This is Bad - Locked External Drives

Adobe Photoshop CS3 would not open RAW files so I tried to update. The updater said I had to have Admin permission to use it. I entered my Admin password and it repeated the dialog endlessly asking the same. I repaired permissions, Then checked permissions using <get info> from the root path all the way to the updater application and it was all set to ME <read and write>. Tried to uninstall CS3 Suite, using their utility, for reinstall with the same results. To make a long story short things went downhill rapidly. I've been using Apple since 1994 and this is the most disturbing and bizarre thing that has ever happened to me. All of my external Firewire disks were locked! The <Get Info> dialog shows every user access status as "custom". I am listed but I cannot change the access to <read and write> or anything else. I can't change any of the other users status, including Admin or System, delete or add users, or make any changes at all after unlocking using my valid password. First I did an Archive and Install and now a Erase and Install. The disk status remains the same. These drives have never given me any problem whatsoever. I hoped a reinstall might fix the problem. Apparently when the system went down it locked these drives. Why or how, don't have a clue.
One is an Archive and one is my Backup. I desperately need the data on these drives. I desperately need to unlock these drives. Is there any way to simply unlock the drives?
Someone please help...

I've got half a dozen OWC Mercury type drive cases. One thing I noticed after 10.5.4 is that some that I had made backup clones now had the "Ignore Ownership" flag set to on - something that I always check and which would prevent a proper backup or restore and wouldn't allow repair permissions.
So in some way, 10.5.4 did do "something" to those FW drives, but not sure how or why the ownership would be changed. And of course I had to unlock to turn Ignore Ownership off.
I wonder if Batchmod would help? Leopard Cache Cleaner -> Maintain has "Repair Home Folder" and "Home Folder ACL" which might get your boot drive and home folder working normal.

Similar Messages

Locked external Drives

Hello! I am using thunar (with thunar-volman, thunar-archive-plugin) on pekwm. When I set everything up, everything worked just fine. However, after a few reboots when i log in, and open thunar, my external drives are shown, but everything in them has little lock symbols. What does that mean? And how do I fix it? If it helps, the external drive in question is an fat32 drive.
*I don't have ntfs-3g installed, because everything worked without it for a while. Before I install it, is it really necessary, since I was using the drive w/o it?

Okay, I see something different. here is what it gave me for the drive:
dr-x------ 1 takemori root 4096 Mar 25 07:28 Games
dr-x------ 1 takemori root 12288 Feb 4 13:03 Discs
dr-x------ 1 takemori root 8192 Apr 29 07:58 Drivers, installer
-r-------- 1 takemori root 138122232 May 22 03:04 f5351591.avi
dr-x------ 1 takemori root 4096 Mar 20 08:51 MOVIES
dr-x------ 1 takemori root 4096 May 23 14:53 Pictures
dr-x------ 1 takemori root 4096 Oct 29 2009 Zips
And then I did the same for my home folder
drwx------ 5 takemori takemori 4096 May 24 16:42 Downloads
drwx------ 3 takemori takemori 4096 May 24 12:28 Pictures
The first one says Username Root. The 2nd is Username username
Could this be why I can access the drive, but not write to it?

Due to a divorce all my music is on my iTunes and iPod. I had to buy a new computer and want to transfer my Library to the new computer. How can I do this without using an external drive and use new computer just like I do the old one? Thanks.

Due to divorce, all my music is on my iTunes and iPod. I have had to buy a new laptop and want to transfer the library to the new computer before deauthorizing the old one. I dont want to have to use an external drive every time I want to listen to my music. How can I do this and have the same basic iTunes setup as before? HELP!

You might consider itunes match for moving CDs you've copied into your itunes library if you dont have a way to use home sharing.
iTunes match is an optional service offered by apple that costs about $25 a year. It scans your music library and if it finds music that is already in apple's itunes catalog it'll automatically "unlock"/"store" these in the cloud for you. Items that it does not find in the catalog it'll upload and store these in the cloud for you and you can download them on your devices. See http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/

Locked External Drives, Please Help!!!!

A few weeks ago I had to reformat our new external studio hard drives because they used the GUID formating from the factory and since I have Mac OSX 10.5/PowerMac G5 for Pro Tools they had to be reformatted to Apple Partition Mapping. Put a former session on it when it was done and opened PT. Session came up and ran fine, recorded fine, etc. This past week we got a DVD from one of our clients with the PT sessions we will be working on for them and dragged all the file to their client folder on one of the new drives. Now we can't record to, change, edit or unlock ANYTHING on these hard drive. I found out by checking the Workspace Browser in PT, the drives are set to "P" play only, tried to change to "R" record and that's when I get the message that the drives where locked and how I first was informed of this whole mess. From there I went to "Get Info" for the drives and all the sharing and permission info is grayed out. The studio account IS the administrator for the computer so we should have full access and privileges. I can't get a straight answer to figure out the procedure to COMPLETELY unlock the hard drives and all the files on them. I also want to know how to prevent this from ever happening again. Can anyone here help me?

See Niel's guide. which might give you some clues.

Changing permissions locked external drives

I'm not 100% positive I've chosen the correct discussion group, so feel free to direct me elsewhere if I haven't. :>)
Last night I changed the permissions on 3 external hard drives. After I was finished they ALL locked themselves up tight and I can't get into them. I can go into disk utility and verify them (they're all fine) but I cannot repair permissions. Two of them are expendable but I really need to get the data off the third. Does anyone have any suggestions I can try?

Thanks for the suggestion, pullman. I actually managed to find a similar one and did get the drives working finally but I appreciate you taking the time to post the link.

Will this work - Duet and External drives thru FireWire hub

I am thinking of getting a Mac Mini, my old 5-year old G4 is having a rough go of it with Logic Studio, so I'm thinking the faster 2.00 Ghz Dual Core Mini may be a better solution. However, I have three external FireWire HD's and I use Apogee's Duet as my inputs so I will need to get a hub (only one FireWire port on the Mini), but will that introduce a whole new set of problems for me? Will this work? Is anyone using this already?

If you do have "noise" in the audio, it will not be because the devices share the same bus.
Digital noise may be created and broadcast by the drives themselves and become thus injected into the audio stream. This can be made worse by poor ground schemes.
Many setups with powered external monitors and/or mixers are susceptible to this particular noise as broadcast by the hard drive. I have these two seagate drives that must be off or you can hear them.
Luck-
-DP

Locked External Drive

What do I do when I see this: The iPhoto library is on a locked volume. Reopen iPhoto when you have read/write access, or reopen iPhoto with the Option key held down to choose another library.

Assuming the volume isn't locked, this is often a symptom of a damaged Library.
Option 1
Back Up and try rebuild the library: hold down the command and option (or alt) keys while launching iPhoto. Use the resulting dialogue to rebuild. Choose to Rebuild iPhoto Library Database from automatic backup.
If that fails:
Option 2
Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one. .
Regards
TD

TS3683 Not enough space on my Mac HD to back up my iPad. My iTunes library is on an external drive. Can I use this same drive to Back yup my iPad?

I don't have enough space on my Mac HD to back up my iPad. Actually, my iTunes library is on an external drive. Can I use this same drive to Back up my iPad?

1. First make sure iPhoto is not running. If it is, quit it. Use the Finder to copy your iPhoto Library file to your external drive. Unless you've changed it, its located inside your Pictures folder and is named "iPhoto Library".
2. After the copy is complete, start iPhoto while simultaneously holding down the option key. iPhoto will bring up a dialog box. The file in the list is your existing Library on your internal disk. Click the "Other Library" button and navigate to your external drive. Select your freshly copied iPhoto Library file and click "Open". iPhoto will from now on open and work with this library on the external drive.
3. After you've confirmed iPhoto is working properly with the newly copied library you may wish to delete the original library in your Pictures folder to recover the disk space.
Don't forget to keep a backup copy of your library on a separate disk. It's not a matter of "if" your external drive will fail but "when". You need to make regular backups or you'll be sorry someday.

Move Mobile Apps Folder To External Drive?

Hi guys,
I've got a MacBook Pro running Lion with all the latest software / updates. This has become my secondary machine (since buying a lovely 27" iMac), and I'm using iTunes Match to keep both the MacBook Pro and iMac's iTunes libraries in sync.
Now that I sync my iPhone and iPad to the iMac, I don't have much need for the Mobile Apps folder on my MacBook Pro. I have a lot of apps, so my Mobile Apps folder is ~50 gigs, and it's suddenly one of the larger items on the MacBook Pro's drive. Would it be possible to relocate this folder to my external drive for the MacBook Pro? I found an older suggestion (to move the Mobile Apps folder, and create a shortcut in the iTunes folder pointing back to me new location), but this didn't work at all.
Is this do-able? As as alternate, can I just delete all the Apps from my MacBook Pro's iTunes library (from within the app) without screwing up the syncing or (via iTunes Match) inadvertantly deleting them all from the iMac as well?
Thanks!

How to use an SSD with your HDD
If you are going to use an SSD as a boot drive together with your existing HDD as the "data" drive, here's what you can do.
After installing the SSD you will need to partition and format the SSD using Disk Utility. Then, install OS X on the SSD. After OS X has been installed boot from the SSD. Use Startup Disk preferences to set the SSD as the startup volume.
Open Users & Groups preferences. Click on the lock icon and authenticate. CTRL- or RIGHT-click on your user account listing in the sidebar and select Advanced Options from the context menu.
You will see a field labeled "Home dir:" At the right end you will see a Change button. Click on it. In the file dialog locate the Home folder now located on the HDD (HDD/Users/account_name/.) Select the folder, click on Open button. Restart the computer as directed.
When the computer boots up it will now be using the Home folder located on the HDD.
Another more technical method involving the Terminal and aliases is discussed in depth here: Using OS X with an SSD plus HDD setup - Matt Gemmell. This is my preferred approach because I can select which of the Home's folders I want on the HDD and which I don't want. For example, I like to keep the Documents and Library folders on the SSD because I access their content frequently.
Be sure you retain the fully bootable system on your HDD in case you ever need it.

Format External Drive for HFS+ volume and FAT32 volume with Disk Utility

I just bought a Seagate 1tb external drive from OWC and I want to partition it into a HFS+ (journaled I assume) volume and a NTFS volume. Objective: To manually backup critical folders from my wife’s Dell (running XP) to the NTFS volume and critical Mac folders from my PowerBookG4 to the HFS volume.
My plan was to have my Mac (10.4.11) do the partitioning into a 350gb FAT32 volume for Windows and a 650gb HFS+ volume for Mac – then take the external drive to the Dell and have the Dell reformat the 350gb FAT drive to NTFS.
First question – Is this possible overall?
Second question – I haven’t been able to get my Disk Utility on my Mac to do the initial partitioning into one HFS volume and one FAT32 volume the way I want it. Is this step possible?
I’m happy to be more specific about the steps I’ve taken if the basic plan is good. From what I’ve found in some forums so far, I think I’m on the right track but am unable to execute it. Thank you.

Thank you Limnos for all your help. Last night I tried again and it worked! I’ not totally sure on what I did right but:
• Both volumes on the new ext. driver were HFS (from my last attempt the other day) so I looked into a simple erase of one partition/volume into a different format, but DU did not offer a way of erasing it into MS-DOS(FAT32). But I think I did a simple HFS erase anyway of the volume I wanted to format to FAT32. There was nothing “in” that volume because this was a new external drive but I figured it could not hurt anything.
• So then, I think I went back to Partition, locked the partition/volume that I wanted to keep in HFS+ for my Mac files, and (re)partitioned the other just erased volume to MS-DOS. I think I did it under the MBR option.
• It worked! Not sure why but my Mac recognized both volumes one as HFS, the other as FAT32. Maybe someone will find this useful some day!!
• Then, I hooked up the drive to my work Dell, the Dell found only the FAT32 drive (as expected), and I executed a short simple easy command I found on ehow.com (search for ‘convert FAT32 to NTFS’) to make that volume NTFS.
Thanks again Limnos and everyone else!

Format External Drive Partitioned OSX extended and FAT32

I am new to the concept of partitioning a drive and have found information mentioning that disk utility has a MS-DOS option for partitioning a drive. I do not have this as a drop down choice in my Disk Utility options. I have read that this is format equivalent to FAT32. I would like to partition this drive half OSX extended and half FAT32. How do I get the drop down choice and is this possible.
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Thank you Limnos for all your help. Last night I tried again and it worked! I’ not totally sure on what I did right but:
• Both volumes on the new ext. driver were HFS (from my last attempt the other day) so I looked into a simple erase of one partition/volume into a different format, but DU did not offer a way of erasing it into MS-DOS(FAT32). But I think I did a simple HFS erase anyway of the volume I wanted to format to FAT32. There was nothing “in” that volume because this was a new external drive but I figured it could not hurt anything.
• So then, I think I went back to Partition, locked the partition/volume that I wanted to keep in HFS+ for my Mac files, and (re)partitioned the other just erased volume to MS-DOS. I think I did it under the MBR option.
• It worked! Not sure why but my Mac recognized both volumes one as HFS, the other as FAT32. Maybe someone will find this useful some day!!
• Then, I hooked up the drive to my work Dell, the Dell found only the FAT32 drive (as expected), and I executed a short simple easy command I found on ehow.com (search for ‘convert FAT32 to NTFS’) to make that volume NTFS.
Thanks again Limnos and everyone else!

OS X not recognizing external drive

I've tried everything with this USB 2.0 external drive. It was formatted in NTFS, MacBook did not recognize it when I plugged it in. It does not even show up in Disk Utility. The only place that the system even recognizes that there is something plugged into it is in System Profiler:
USB 2.0 Storage Device:
Version: 1.03
Bus Power (mA): 500
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Product ID: 0x5621
Serial Number: 00042222200000115773
Vendor ID: 0x0402
I tried reformatting in FAT32 -- still nothing. Bad enclosure? The drive works on any windows system, so the drive is not bad. It's a Hitachi Deskstar 164.7 GB. Thanks in advance..

Hi all,
Hi,
is it possible that the HD was configured as a 'Dynamic Disk' when created in Windows ?
Macs do have problems with these kind of HDs.
See here for informations about Dynamic Disks: http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B308424&x=9&y=12
and this on How-To convert back to Basic Disks (which Macs can use): http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B309044&x=15&y=14
Also is the HD self-powered or USB-Bus-powered ?
If bus-powered a power-supply for the drive might help.
Regards
Stefan

Formatting a WD Elements 3TB external drive...temporary file normal?

Hi All,
I am, I hope, at the end of a 36+ hour formatting process with this WD Elements 3TB external drive. I decided to zero out the drive and when I went to bed last night at around 12am, there were about 6 hours left in the process. This morning at aroud 9am I went to check on the drive, expecting it to be ready to go, but I found it writing a temporary file. The progress bar is about 90% done. Is this part of the normal zeroing out process? If so, how long should this take? If this ISN'T part of the normal process, what should I do?
Thanks to all who read this, many thank to those who respond.

gridout1959 wrote:
but I found it writing a temporary file. The progress bar is about 90% done. Is this part of the normal zeroing out process?
Yes, DU is creating a huge file of Zeros and will confirm, the driver software will map off any failing sectors before you lay data on it.
That is a good proceedure your doing, because if you run out of spare sectors the drive is bad and you can get a refund/exchange right away.
gridout1959 wrote:
Hi All,
I am, I hope, at the end of a 36+ hour formatting process with this WD Elements 3TB external drive. .....If so, how long should this take? If this ISN'T part of the normal process, what should I do?
3TB? well 500GB should take about a hour and a half, so 9 hours and it should have been completed.
36+ hours, there is either something wrong with the drive, or DU is not prepared to handle drives in that large amount. which I suspect is more the case, but I might be wrong.
Likely 1TB is it's limit, so use partitions and zero each of those, then reformat.
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Problems with iMac G5 and LaCie external drives

I have an early iMac G5 (without iSight), running OS 10.5.2. I've had a 250GB LaCie external hard drive for about a year now, and it worked fine up until a couple weeks ago, when I got this message:
Disk Repair
The disk "External HD" was not repairable by this computer. It is being made available to you with limited functionality. You must back up your data and reformat the disk as soon as possible."
I was unable to save anything to the drive after this, including altering files already on the drive. Long story short, I bought another LaCie drive, because I needed more space anyway. I got the 500 GB model, moved everything onto it, erased the old drive, and then I had two working drives. I've since only been using the new drive, but just a few days later, I got the same message again, and am having the same problem, but this time for the new drive. I'm not a computer-savvy person, so I have no idea what could be causing this. This happened not long after updating to OS 10.5 from 10.4 - I'm not sure if this could be related. Can anyone help?

One thing to look out for is the power source. If you have a huge octopus of power cords plugged into one outlet, the drive may not be getting enough power to operate properly. That would explain why the same thing happened on two separate drives, both recently. You may have added something new to the +power strip+ that is overtaxing the available power draw.
Someone I know had this issue. It never occurred to him or me to consider this possibility. His external drive was regularly getting disk directory errors. I initially thought the drive was going bad, but once we distributed the power cords to two power strips connected to different outlets, the problem did not recur.
Your problem may be something else, but it sounded too familiar to not mention my experience with the power cord octopus monster.

How do I use an external drive with iTunes

I want to use an external drive (Windows XP & USB) for My Music Library. iTunes is running on the 'C' drive and points to the external drive. When I 'add folders' the music is available and plays, but I don't have my playlists or the play count / last played data. I have copied the 2 iTunes Library files into the exact same location on the external drive (My Music\iTunes). Either iTunes or Windows moves these files to the 'C' drive My Music\iTunes folder, and I don't have problem with these files on the 'C' drive as long as the music/video files reside on the external drive. I would like to set this up so the external drive looks and responds just like if the library was on the 'C' drive.
Can someone help me get this right so it works?
Thank you very much
iPod 60GB Video Windows XP USB 120GB External drive w/42GB of My Music

Have a look at this article in the Apple Knowledge Base.

This is Bad - Locked External Drives

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