Permission Problems with Leopard & Time Machine are ridiculous!

Question

I just had a hard drive die in a MacBook. I installed a new drive and restored from TM.
Only to find out I have absolutely no ownership to anything in my home directory.
System & Admin -r/w, everyone r --- no where is my id mentioned as having ANY r/w access.
Leopard has been a disaster on 2 out of 3 Macs I've installed it on.
If I wanted this kind of crap I'd use Windows full time.

Answer 1

You'll need to reset permissions on your home directory. Follow these steps:
1) Boot from your Leopard install CD/DVD (insert it, shut down, start while holding "C")
2) Choose your language.
3) When the menubar appears, select Utilities>Reset Password.
4) In the window that appears, select your boot volume (by default, "Macintosh HD") from the list at the top.
5) In the popup menu below the volume list, select an affected user. (One that you used "Apply to enclosed items" on).
6) Click the "Reset" button at the bottom of the window. This will reset the permissions (and ACLs) back to their default settings.
7) Repeat Steps 5 & 6 for every user on your machine who has this problem (except "System Administrator (Root)").
There is one bug in this process, so you need to take some additional steps to get permissions back to how they should be.
8) Log in to an account you reset the permissions for.
9) Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
10) Copy the blue text in, and press "return". chgrp -R `id -gn` ~
11) You won't see anything happen, but you can check that it worked by selecting your home folder, and clicking File>Get Info. You will see either "unknown" or "staff" under "Sharing and Permissions", depending on how you installed Leopard. Either one is fine.
12) Repeat the steps 8-11 for every account that you reset permissions for on your machine. (Remember, NOT "System Administrator (Root)").
Good luck!
Message was edited by: joshz