Please help - external hard drive security / privileges issue.

Yesterday while messing around with my mac I stupidly changed a setting I can't seem to remedy.
I may have somehow selected an obscure security / privileges option, most likely within the 'get info' option and now my external hard drive icon is not visible on my desktop so I can reselect it to unselect the setting. I know its ok because 'disk first aid' can verify its presence but I can't see it.
Urgently need access as I have data i need to retrieve.
Please help.
G4 OS 10.4

I`m a little confused. Disk First Aid is a utility from MacOS 9.
Do you mean disk utility ?
If yes, in the upper line is a button for unmounting a disk. I don`t want to try it, but is it possible that a unmounted disk can be mounted again ?
I just found out, that when you move the cursor over the button, it says: unmount or mount a disk. Maybe that`s it.
Message was edited by: Helmut Kaleth
Message was edited by: Helmut Kaleth

Similar Messages

Please Help - External Hard Drive Issue

1) Most of my music is on an external hard drive.
2) I do not always keep my external hard drive connected to my computer.
3) Recently, out of the blue, itunes started saying it couldn't find the files in library.
4) I deleted the library and re-loaded it so that all the filepaths were correct.
5) I disconnected my hard drive and opened my itunes library. It obviously couldn't find the files because the hard drive wasn't attached.
6) I re-attached the hard drive.
7) I opened itunes. It is no longer finding the files. Somehow the old filepaths were all erased. I have more than 7,500 songs, so finding the file for each one doesn't work as a solution.
I need to find a solution for this. I want my library on my C drive because I still have some music on that drive and don't want to have to attach my hard drive every time I add music (something I then do later). I tried sorting through all the other information out there, but there is too much and it's too varied. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks so much.
Aidan
P.S. I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the itunes 8.0.2, which seems not to have some of the buttons shown on previous versions (i.e. "import"). Thoughts?

Thanks so much for the help. It's seriously annoying to have to do this, but if that's what it takes.... One question: Is there not any way just to keep the file paths the same? i.e. If, when I add the folder to the library, the file path points to the location on my external hard drive, why won't it just stay pointed there so that an error message shows when the hard drive's not attached but then doesn't show when it is? I mean, it seems that itunes is re-naming/re-addressing the file path whenever the hard drive's not attached - a very aggravating feature.
Thanks again.

HELP, external hard drive suddenly "not readable"

Hi everyone,
It appears that my external hard drive that held most of my film material is messed up. It's not being recognized by my mac and the drive was really hot when I touched it.
I have to try to figure this out as on this drive I have 100's of hours of edited material in this one film that I was almost finished with.
Does anyone know anything about this type of stuff, what might of happened and how I might be able to recover the drive?
I'm so lost right now.
It's a 250GB western digital.
when i reboot, the mac sees there is a new drive attached and asks if I want to format the new unformatted drive. To be exact it says:
The drive you inserted was not readable by this computer.
The it provides the following buttons: INITIALIZE - IGNORE - EJECT
Please, any help would be sooooo appreciated.
Jay

Open the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder and try using the Repair Disk function on the drive; if it doesn't work, an utility such as TechTool Pro or DiskWarrior may be able to repair the drive. If you have AppleCare for that machine, you have or can get TechTool Deluxe, which can be used for this task.
(18251)

WD Elements External Hard Drive: No Sleep Issue

Hello,
I know this probably isn't the best place for this as it's not directly related to an iMac. But it works.
I have two WD Elements (http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=304&lang=en) external hard drives that I use for a Time Machine and for a Media drive. I've got them plugged into a Belkin Powered USB Hub (http://store.apple.com/us/product/TW306LL/A) which is then of course attatched to my iMac. My issue is that the two hard drives seem to continue to work at full power once I've shut my computer off.
Is there anyway I can have them go into sleep mode?
I was considering splicing a switch onto the power cord of the USB Hub so that I could easily turn it off once the computer is off. However that seems a bit silly?
Thank you for your time, and opinions,
Robin

Thanks for the suggestion. I can't believe I didn't think about that as I knew about it.
It seems to have helped when the computer is on. I can see that at some points they are working a lot less, which is great. So thank you.
Unfortunately they seem to be still working at full power them the computer is off. I figure this is because they are not directly attatched to the computer itself so nothing is telling them to "sleep."

Need help: External Hard Drive doesn't show up

i havent use my external hard drive in 3 months. Before when i connect the usb, the hard drive shows up in the finder and i can transfer files and ext, but now it doesnt show up in the finder at all. I've check the disk utility and the EHDrive appears there, i've tried to click the verify and repair but it doesnt mount in the finder. I've also tried opening the HDrive in my player and it does open..
so please help me with regard to this ..

How is the drive connected to the computer? USB, Firewire......
Do you have another computer to see if the hard drive will mount there?
Restart the computer holding down the command - option/alt - P - R keys before the gray screen appears. Continue to hold until you hear the startup chime for the second time.
Reset NVRAM/PRAM
Disconnect the drive from the computer, shut it down for about 1 minute, connect it to the computer and turn it back on. While, doing that, restart the computer.
Try using another cable to connect the drive to the computer.

Can't set up an iPhoto library on external hard drive: access privileges

Hi all
I am trying to set up an extra iPhoto library on an external hard-drive to store some of my photos.
I get the following message: 'iPhoto cannot create a new library in this location because you do not have enough access privileges.'
The external hard drive is Formatted: Mac OS Extended (Journaled), is 500g capacity and is empty. Also 'Ignore ownership on this volume' is ticked.
I am the administrator of this computer (imac) which is running Yosemite 10.10.1
Any clues as to what I need to do to make this happen? I'm not much of a techie!
Cheers
Finella

Once you've confirmed that the EHD is formatted correctly and all is well (run Disk Utility and repair the disk) try the following to create an almost "duplicate" library on the EHD:
Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
1 - download iPhoto Library Manager and launch.>Click on the Add Library button,
2 - select the library you want to add from those in the selection window.
3 - make sure that in the rebuild window the checkbox "Scavange orphaned photos" is checked.
4 - now that the library is listed in the left hand pane of iPLM, click on your library and go to the Library ➙ Rebuild Library menu option
5 - in the next window name the new library and select the EHD as the location where you want it to be placed. Click on the Create button.
Note 1: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments. However, books, calendars, cards and slideshows will be lost.
Note 2: Your current library will be left untouched for further attempts at a fix if so desired.

External Hard Drive and iMac issues

When I plug in my external hard drive to my macbook pro, it works great. But when I plug it into my new iMac, it shows up as read only? What can I do to rectify the situation without reformatting the hard drive?

Hi jsncrwfrd182,
If you are having an issue with being unable to access an external hard drive because of permissions, I would suggest that you troubleshoot using the steps in this article -
OS X Mountain Lion: If you don’t have permission to use a disk
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L

Snow Leopard on an external hard drive; sign-in issues, Snow Leopard on an external hard drive; sign-in issues

I have an older (circa 2006) MacBook running Tiger. I've been able to install Snow Leopard on an external hard drive and when I restart, it seems to boot from the external drive. However, it asks for a user name and password and the combination I use in Tiger doesn't work. I don't get an option for an admin user/password.
Any suggestions?

If you did a fresh installation from the original installer disk, then unless you used Migration Utility as part of the installation then you would have been stepped through the process to set up a user acount. Without that there would be no account to log into. So either you don't remember, you didn't install on an empty drive, or you used Migration Utility.
In any case, boot from the original installer, select the external drive, and under the Utilities menu choose Password Reset.
Regards.

External Hard Drive and Import Issue

I'm sorry...I know the answer is here but I've read and read and just can't understand.
I have an external hard and imported about 30 gigs into Iphoto with the settings to NOT create a copy into the Iphotos directory. So I understand why the don't show up in Iphoto when the external is not connected but I don't understand why 10 gigs of memory was consumed when I executed the import???
Any help for a newbie would be gratefully appreciated....

A. Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). iPhoto needs to have the Library sitting on disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Users with the Library sitting on disks otherwise formatted regularly report issues including, but not limited to, importing, saving edits and sharing the photos.
B. When you run a Referenced Library iPhoto makes aliases that point to your own photos. To convert to a Managed Library you need to replace those with the actual files. AliasHerder is an application that will replace these aliases with the actual files, and so preserve your Library and all your work in it. As always: back up first.
C. To move the Library:
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.

Please Help! Hard drive problem "Mystery Gb Space"

I recently ripped a lot of CD’s into itunes, so much that I filled up my hard drive. I cleaned up my music by deleting music I didn’t need. I also burned a majority of music to CD so that I could delete it off my hard drive. I have a 80gb hard dive; I freed up 20gb of space. I did not secure the trash when I deleted the music files. So for a while I had 20gb of free space, but a few days ago I looked at my istat pro and noticed that I now have a full hard drive again. I have not ripped any CD’s, downloaded any thing, or done any thing that would take up this much space. I contacted apple but all they would help me with was buying a plan. The only advice I was given was to secure trash. I would like to know where this “extra gb space” came from.
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Get "Disk Inventory X" (it is freeware.)
http://www.derlien.com/
It searches your hard drive and gives you a visual representation of all of your hard drive space usage. It seperates each file type into groups of colors etc so you can see where you have 15gb of mp3's and such. You can use it to open finder windows to those files. Just be careful not to delete any system files with it!
Also, you can save yourself about 7gigs right off the bat by deleting all of the sound files your computer comes with for garageband (unless you use garageband.) I know I don't, and I couldnt believe they ship these machines packed with almost 7 gigs of sound files that you may or may not use...

External Hard Drive/Mac & PC issue

Similar questions have been asked but they don't answer my question.
I've got a 320GB external harddrive that I use on my iMac at home, and a PC at work, the hard disk has worked fine in the past however now it is only working on my work PC as well as my home PC and a laptop. When I use it on a mac it simply says that I have read only access.
HELP!!
The harddrive only has 35GB used

Ok. First off if you decide to do this, remember to make sure you have a backup of anything you have on the external because it will be erased when you partition it. It's very simple really. Just use the disk utility in mac osx 10.4.8 to do half of the drive. Make sure the drive is plugged in and ready to go (listed on your osx desktop). Load up disk utility, highlight the hard drive NOT any volumes you may have on it, but only the actual hard drive (should be at the very top of the listing). Click on partition button, and partition it for only half (or whatever you want) of the actual space on your drive .. Example:320G divided by 2 is 160G. Oh and make sure you partition it for mac os extended (journaled). After this is done, make sure you properly disconnect the hard drive from your mac. Before you take it to your pc, make sure you have the windows drivers for it because during the installation of the hard drive via your firewire port, you'll be asked for the driver disk. Since I had already deleted everything on my disk I just went to WD's website and d/l'd the driver(s) from there. Plug it in and once it is recognized and you have it set up on windows, then it should show up in my computer. Just right click on the drive and scroll down to format, it should come up with a box giving you some options. Capacity, File System ...etc...etc.. Just choose the rest of what's left on the drive, space wise, and make sure that the file system is NTFS. DO NOT USE QUICK FORMAT or COMPRESSION. Once windows is done, then you'll have two completely different partitions on your hard drive, one you can use when you're hooked up to the mac, and the other when you are hooked up to your windows system. I back up both of my systems on the same drive. Oh and DO NOT CONNECT BOTH SYSTEMS AT THE SAME TIME TO THE DRIVE.
That should be it man. I hope this helps ya out. Oh and although this was relatively easy for me I did it at my own risk. You will have to do the same. If you are not comfortable doing it, then DON'T.

Please Help! Hard Drive Problem

Hi, I know there are various other posts with a similar problem but I have tried a lot of suggestions and keep hitting a brick wall. Apologies if this rambles on a bit or doesn't make a lot of sense.
Two nights ago my 18 month old imac refused to start up properly and hangs on the grey screen with the fans blowing at full capacity. I have tried various suggestions such as resetting the PRAM and SMU and then opened disk utility from the install cd.
Verifying/repairing disk permissions got stuck about 3/4 of the way through so I then tried to repair disk which failed. various messages told me that there were "invalid node structure" and that it was rebuilding "Catalog B-tree".
I was then told that
volume MAC HD could not be repaired
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired
when I attempt to repair the disk again Macintosh HD is now greyed out (although i can still select it) - clicking repair disc again this time brings up various missing thread records, then -
invalid sibling link
volume check failed.
opening in firewire target disc mode brings up the usual firewire icon on the imac but my ibook doesn't seem to recognise that any external drives are plugged in.
Any other suggestions? - Is the Hard Drive completely gone or is there any hope? Will erasing the disk and starting from scratch going to do anything? Most of the stuff on the computer is backed up so I am not bothered if I lose everything.
thanks in advance.

Hello Again, Happy New Year!
Managed to get a copy of Disk Warrior Yesterday but now have different problems.
When I try to start up from the Disk Warrior CD the mac does what it should, I click agree to the terms and conditions, the Disk Warrior title screen comes up and then the mac restarts again.
Now rather than hang on the grey screen it goes to a black screen with white text (single user mode???) with the message -
/etc/master.passwd: No such file or directory
-sh-2.05b
If I try to start up from the Mac OS install disc this works "fine" - i.e the computer doesn't automatically restart itself but disk repair still fails.
If I enter Target disc mode my imac fails to show up on my ibook so that I can get to any of my files but it shows up in Disk Utlity, etc.
The Disk Warrior CD works fine on my ibook. I have tried to repair the iMac hard drive on my iBook using disk warrior (iMac in target disk mode).
It gets as far as Step 5 - locating directory data then appears to hang and the spinning wheel comes up. I left it over night and there is now a message saying that
Speed Inhibited by Disc Malfunction.
The spinning wheel is still going and Disk Warrior is still trying to locate directory data.
Any recommendations? The Disc Malfunction message worries me somewhat - will reformatting the disc and starting from scratch do any good or will I just be wasting my time.
cheers

External hard drive suddenly having issues

The following is what disk utility gives me
Verifying volume “disk1s1”
** /dev/disk1s1
** Phase 1 - Preparing FAT
** Phase 2 - Checking Directories
Unable to read directory (Input/output error)
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.
Verify and Repair volume “disk1s1”
** /dev/disk1s1
** Phase 1 - Preparing FAT
** Phase 2 - Checking Directories
Unable to read directory (Input/output error)
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
it was fine ince we got it less then 3 months ago, then the other day after OSX warned me that I had filled the internal HD (oops) I went to access this hard drive, and it showed no files. cleared some space on the internal, reboot, and it said the external was corrupt. tried it on my Power book g4 and got the same. though I noticed that on my PowerBook, it said it was Fat32 (which it is) where as the computer it was on (a newer intel Mini) is reporting it as fat.
any idea *** the problem is?

also, that was the first time I had tried to access it that day

External Hard Drive Read-Only Issue

I have a Samsung M3 portable 2TB hard drive which i used to back up my iMac to take travelling with my Macbook Pro. Today it has turned to read only and everything in the disk utility is greyed out. I haven't used this hard drive on any other machines. I've tried running this in Terminal as advised by KAPPY and here are the results:
sudo chown root:admin
chown: /Volumes/SAMSUNG: Read-only file system
sudo chmod a+rwx
chmod: Unable to change file mode on /Volumes/SAMSUNG: Read-only file system
killall Finder
When opening get info it says 'you can only read' in the sharing & permissions section. This is the first time i've tried to copy anything from the Macbook to the Samsung device since transferring all the data. Also sometimes when I connect the drive it doesn't appear in the sidebar in Finder. Macbook Pro with Retina display running OS X Yosemite v10.10.2.

I have found a solution!
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/how-to-manually-enable-ntfs-read-and-write-in-os-x/
"First ensure that your NTFS drive has a simple single-word name, and then go to the Applications > Utilities folder and launch the Terminal program. In here, run the following command to edit the fstab file (supply your password when prompted):
sudo nano /etc/fstab
The Terminal should now show an editor window for the fstab file, in which you can enter the following all on one line. Be sure to change the word NAME to the name of your drive (it is case-sensitive):
LABEL=NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse
When finished, press Control-O to save the file, followed by Control-X to exit, and then unmount your NTFS drive and attach it again. When you do so, the system will no longer immediately show it in the Finder, but you can go back to the Terminal and run the following command to reveal it in the hidden Volumes directory where the system mounts all attached drives:
open /Volumes
In the folder that opens, you should see the mounted NTFS volume, and should now be able to copy files to it, or otherwise manage files on it. If you need to access this volume more frequently, you can drag it to the sidebar, or make an alias of it in the location of your choice. You can also view the Volumes directory in Column mode to reveal it as a parent directory, from which you can create an alias instead of doing so on a per-drive basis."
This may only be a temporary fix but hopefully it will last me until I can afford to buy a new drive!

Please recommend external hard drive

I have 80G HD and it had only 2G left (big music library)
I just purchased video converter (Blackmagic Design H.264 Format Video Recorder)
to convert my VHS library into digital media.
Please advice which HD I should buy to store about 100 tapes? 1T or 2T? or maybe less GIG with burning DVD as backup?
Here is what I have:
Machine Name: PowerBook G4 15"
Machine Model: PowerBook5,2
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (1.1)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.25 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 512 MB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
System Version: Mac OS X 10.4.11 (8S165)
Kernel Version: Darwin 8.11.0
Boot Volume: Macintosh HD
Disk Description : FUJITSU MHT2080AT Total Capacity : 74.5 GB (80,026,361,856 Bytes)
Connection Bus : ATA Write Status : Read/Write

You could consider an enclosure with a place for two hard disk drives, and learn about how to set up a RAID array so you get two copies at once, of all backups into such a drive configuration.
Also, if your computer has Firewire ports, you could choose to look for an external enclosure with that connection FW800 interface, and also be sure it has its own power supply. Some of these are also good at being able to use a clone copy of the Mac OS X, so you have a backup bootable system on hand. These would be created by a clone utility in a partition of an externally enclosed hard disk drive; separate from other backup schemes or devices. FireWire enclosures for use with booting Mac OS X clones, may have a chipset in them to make them more compatible with running OS X from an external drive. I have some that sport an 'oxford-type chipset' from a few years ago.
The OWC esales brand of external drive enclosures look inviting. I have one that was gifted to me, never used it and have never bought from them. It is USB when I needed a FW option. They do have those.
Oh, if you have up to four USB devices plugged into your iMac, you may consider getting a quality brand powered USB hub, so as to not overload the limited power of the iMac USB board. And if you use a wired USB keyboard, be sure it gets plugged directly into the Mac, for use when or if the Hub may be acting up.
Good luck & happy computing!

Please help - external hard drive security / privileges issue.

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for