LOCKED HARD DRIVE!!! HELP!!

Ok.. so here's the scoop. I am on my imac, but i have a macbook as well- my roomate asked to use my macbooks, so i assumed there was a way to password lock the hard drive so he couldn't access my files- i right clicked and clicked INFO and under privileges i clicked "nobody" for access, assuming that would exempt the person with the password. NOW.. i cannot do anything on that computer. I restarted it and when i login, it's just a blank blue screen. no keys will unlock it i can only move the mouse and turn the computer off. What do i do? HELP PLEASE!

Why didn't you just set up a new user account for him
to use? He wouldn't have had access to your files.
Anyway ... you might try rebooting from the install
CD, and running Disk Utility on the hard drive to
repair permissions.
Matt
Hey Matt...
Sometimes I don't think before I do, and I should have thought about that but I'm not too familiar with Macs yet, I've only had it a few months. BUT...
I inserted the install cd, but as I said it will not allow anything. It didn't pop up, there's no desktop or any icons of any sort. Just the blue screen and the mouse, that's all.
Maybe it's gonna be like that forever?

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Hi prkrgrp,
I'm sorry, I'm a bit unclear on the exact nature of your question. If you are having issues starting up from your original Install Disk and running Disk Utility to repair your hard drive, you may find the information and steps outlined in the following articles helpful:
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Macbook will not boot. Locked hard drive. Blue screen when booting

Hi, my little brother decided he wanted a few files off of my mac book, so he went to settings>sharing>file sharing and added my only hard drive to the list and tried removing everyone but his name and password thinking it would only effect people trying to log into my hard drive, not actually me on my computer alone trying to boot mac osx from it.
He came crying to me telling me he paniced because he saw a locked icon on my hard drive and couldn't do anything, so tried to restart the macbook and now i just get a blue screen and nothing happens when i try booting it.
Right now i'm thinking i gotta archive and reinstall from booting the osx disk, but i'm affraid it'll just apply the same settings again and keep me locked out. I need files off of my hard drive since i'm in school and have several assignments that i have not backed up at all.
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after searching the forums deeper i found the solution. it's now working. you may delete this thread.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2087835

Locked hard drive

An Apple remanufactured Mac Pro purchased two months ago has locked its hard drive (possibly with help from a cat that walked across the keys). It won't accept our administrator password. We never noticed whether filevault or firewalls were set by Apple before we received it, but messages on forums seem to point to that as a cause.
Unfortunately, we have not backed up the few new files added, but these are critical files that we need back. Nevertheless, all the Mac offers is wiping the drive, reformatting, and starting installation over with the recommendation that we back up as many files as possible before continuing. This is a catch 22 since it won't let us have access to anything on our drive but the disk utility, restore from Time Machine Backup, and reinstall. It gives us limited Safari to Apple.
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Thanks for the reminder. We discovered that we had 2 days left on the support line but opted for an appointment with Apple this Sunday instead. It seems as though someone in Apple should have a backdoor for this that might preserve data.
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Permission denied locked hard drives cannot access

I have an issue wher my external hard drives have becom locked and cannot unlock them. Syas I do not have sufficient priviledges.
My user/ also set as adim kept on being askes to authenticate even on the main HD if i went to move a file and some files I wasn't even able to rename even after authentication. So i went and I added the user in the get info permissions tab and applied to all enclosed items... BANg then the external became locked. I cannot get in and unlock them. My usre says custom access in the info tabs and when i try to change it it goes back to the custom access and still locked. I repaired permissions and still the same same thing.
Help getting back! and assigning read/write permissions and access.
Thanks in advance,
joe

JCaravella wrote:
I have an issue wher my external hard drives have becom locked and cannot unlock them. Syas I do not have sufficient priviledges.
My user/ also set as adim kept on being askes to authenticate even on the main HD if i went to move a file and some files I wasn't even able to rename even after authentication. So i went and I added the user in the get info permissions tab and applied to all enclosed items... BANg then the external became locked.
bang indeed. by using "apply to enclosed items" on the whole startup hard drive you totally messed your system. you now have no choice but to reinstall snow leopard. so boot from the SL install DVd and reinstall. when the reinstall is finished log in and run the following terminal commands (copy and paste, please)
sudo chflags 0 /volumes/*
sudo chmod a+rx /volumes/*
you'll have to enter your admin password (which you won't see). that's normal. this should unlock your drives.
Also, NEVER EVER use "apply to enclosed items on ANY system created folders, your startup drive or the time machine drive. That includes folders like your Documents folder, your Desktop folder etc. use it only on folders you made yourself. system created folders often have hidden ACLs and using 'apply to enclosed items" on them will propagate those ACLs to everything inside and buy you a lot of trouble. and system folders outside your home directory should not be touched period. certainly don't go changing permissions on any of them.

Locked Hard Drive / Can't Change Privileges or Permissions!

My non-bootup internal hard drive (a RAID array) is locked. I don't know how it happened for sure, but I can't view any of my files or change any of the disk's privileges or permissions.
Disk utility can't un-mount the disk, but says in the "Disk Check" that everything is okay. The option to repair permissions in Disk Utility is grayed out because OS X is not installed on this volume.
I have tried using terminal to CHOWN and CHMOD the volume, but for both commands it says "Operation not permitted." When I CMD-Click the mounted drive, this appears in the info pane:
Sharing & Permissions:
Name Privilege
(Me) Custom
admin Custom
(Me) Custom
admin Custom
everyone Custom
I can't change any of the "custom" settings, whether I unlock the padlock or not. All I can change is "Ignore ownership," which does nothing to help...
I already archived my OS and re-installed 10.5, then upgraded to 10.5.7 and still no luck. I'M TOTALLY STUMPED! Any ideas?

Okay, it looks like I've solved the problem. After LOTS of searching, I found a discussion that led to the solution... I first ran this command in terminal:
ls -alO /Volumes
This command revealed that the "user immutable flag" was set (the text "uchg" appeared with the problematic drive) and permissions looked odd. The following commands fixed both problems:
chflags nouchg '/Volumes/<drive name>'
sudo chmod 1775 '/Volumes/<drive name>'
For anyone else who needs help with this issue, here's the URL that helped me:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=90894
(Posts 4-10 were great!)

Major Hard Drive Help???

My computer suddenly started to have an alternating beep (soft, sounded like an alarm clock) and ticking sound and then locked up. Then on start up, I would hear the sound (about one beep and tick per 2 seconds at a low volume), there would be a quick, strange flash on the display and then I got a blinking folder/?. Starting up with the install disk and running disk utilitity, no hard drive shows up, but when I run a hardware performance test (extended), it passes.
I keep most of my important data on an external but I would like to recover email and a few files. Is this possible? Is it even possible to reformat at this point or is the hard drive completely done? Thanks very much for any help...

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think your drive is dead - you can try taking it out and putting it in an enclosure and see if anything will work, but if Data Rescue can't see it, that's not a good sign.
Please post back,
Miriam
P.S., if you'd like, go ahead and click the "Helpful" or "Solved" buttons on any of the posts / replies above if you feel they were helpful or adequately answered your question.

External Hard drive help: use with mac and pc? how to backup everything etc

Hello! I need some help regarding a new external hard drive I got from OWC. It is a 500 gb firewire 400 + usb 2.0 7200 rpm hard drive. I am running it from firewire. The software suggests the first thing you do is make a clone of your macbooks internal hard drive, that way if it fails later you can use the external to back everything up. If I do this ...
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2. Can I still back up other stuff like my audio recordings and record onto that drive to a seperate folder?
3. If I make a bootable copy will it try and boot from the drive everytime I turn it on or something?
My other question is... how can I use this drive with a pc? I have a pc as well and I heard that the only way it will work is to format it in ms-dos mode (fat32?)
If I write it to fat32 will it slow down my drive or make it worse? I heard that you should format external drives specifically for mac if you have a mac; so it will only work with macs...
(sorry this is going on and on; it's like a chain reaction of questions)
so If its formatted to mac drive format then can I do this with my current situation:
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3. then store it on my external?
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Thank you for reading, sorry for making this so long.

1. No, you don't have to make a bootable clone.
2. If you use the drive for a bootable backup, then you cannot use the drive for other types of storage unless you partition the drive and make more than one volume.
3. No, it will not try to boot the computer. You must designate the startup volume using Startup Disk preferences.
If you wish to use the drive on both a Mac and a PC, then either you make two partitions - one for Mac and the other for the PC or you must format the entire drive using FAT32 so the drive can be used for read//write by both operating systems. If you do this then you cannot use the drive for a bootable backup nor can you use it with Time Machine.
FAT32 is slower for read/write on the Mac than using Mac formatting.
Optimally, I would suggest you partition the drive into two volumes. One volume formatted for the Mac and the other formatted FAT32.
You can send files from a PC to a Mac and vice-versa using File Sharing. Select Mac Help from the Finder's Help menu and search for "file sharing" or "sharing" to find help articles. Also see,
Mac OS X 10.5 Help- Setting up a Mac computer to share files with Windows users
Mac OS X 10.5 Help- Setting up a Windows computer to share files with Mac users
Mac OS X 10.5 Help- Sharing with Windows computers

Weird problem involving my external hard drive - help please!

I recently got a formac mini 120 gb firewire hard drive, which had been working fine with my g4 quicksliver.
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I recently gave my drive to another friend using a g5 and when it came back, nothing - i don't get the drive symbol appearing. turned the comp on and off many times and tried re-connecting etc still no drive appearing.
Then i took the drive to my friend with a mac lap top power book. connected there - working fine. Baffling. was happy that my data can still be accessed.
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Thought you could use this info about getting FireWire to work!
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Try resetting your FireWire ports by disconnecting all FW devices, shut down your Mac and unplug it from AC power (wall socket) for 30 minutes. plug it back in and try FW.
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If that still did'nt get it Zap the PRAM. While restarting Mac hold down the following key combo Command-Option-P-R. Keep holding those keys down till you hear the second start-up chime, then release.
For those of you with Macs that are not PowerBooks or iBooks, a bad internal battery can cause FireWire to not be recognized, so make sure it's good! Also, here is Apple doc.#88338 on getting FireWire to work.
Good Luck!
Cheers!
DALE

Saving and reopening an iDVD project from a hard drive - HELP!

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Hi Mamalisa
iDVD can't find my files for the pictures and sometimes the audio and video.
And welcome to apple discussions. If you plan to do further modifications to your iDvd project then follow these steps. (btw, iDvd doesn't like it when you change the actual location of video / audio assets once encoded / burned to DVD-R unless it's saved or rather archived beforehand).
On the other hand if you plan no further changes then you may wish to follow this instead of the above.
By sdmacuser at 2009-09-03
Hope this helps but if not just come on back.

Mac OSX is telling me to reformat my external hard drive - HELP!

I have Fantom Drives external hard drive which I use to backup my Mac (via Time Machine) as well as for general storage. Recently, when I turned on my external hard drive I was given the following message:
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if the drive can not be repaired you should try reformatting.
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http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070204093925888
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Message was edited by: V.K.

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Somehow the location of the music got changed back to her C drive.
Because iTunes was started with the external drive not plugged in or not online and ready.
I redid the location but now every song has the exclamation mark
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http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVE.cfm
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LOCKED HARD DRIVE!!! HELP!!

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