Unable to change permissions on external drive.

I have an external Firewire drive attached to my PowerMac G5 running 10.5.5. Until the past few days I have been easily accessing (reading and writing) all areas of this drive from my standard non-admin user account since I have the "Ignore ownership on this volume" box checked in the get-info dialogue.
Recently however I have been unable to write to this drive from my non-admin account. When I go to the get-info dialogue, the "Ignore ownership on this volume" box is still checked but that doesn't seem to matter.
I am unable to click on the little padlock icon to change any permissions for any file on this partition (the other partition of this drive is being used by Time Machine, and does not seem to have the "Ignore ownership on this volume" box, and I am able to click on the padlock to make changes).
Any idea what is going on?

I am having a similar problem, but I cannot unlock the drive - as there is no lock icon .The drive is one I bought at Best Buy, and is formatted FAT32. I cannot see anywhere to unlock the drive since I moved to SL. It worked fine before I did the conversion. My other drives (I have 5 total) allow me to read and write, but the problem drive is set to read-only. Any suggestions? The specifics in info are: Kind: Volume, Modified: Yesterday..., Format: MS_DOS (FAT32), Capacity: 319.99 GB, Available: 106.48 GB, etc... Shared Folder is unchecked. Sharing and Permissions says "You can only read"
Thanks for the help!

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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.

Cannot change permissions to external hard drives

My usb partitions are all set to "custom" permissions and they cannot be changed no matter what I have tried. I tried creating new Administrator accounts but I cannot assign any new accounts or settings to the partitions. They merely appear on the desktop with a lock icon on them.
What caused this issue is I wanted to remove the annoying "unknown user" under permissions for an external partition. It would not allow me to do that so I tried to apply disk permissions to "all enclosed items". This did not help either so I tried repairing disk permissions and it appeared to start to fix a trillion disk permission errors that would take 2 hours estimated to do so. It suggested canceling and reinstalling the OS after backing up your files.
So I took that suggestion, cancelled the repairing process, but was not able to back up my files because of this change to the partitions that all now appear with a lock.
I have a feeling it will require some Terminal commands to reapply new permissions to the partitions, which I would need help doing.
Thanks for any assistance.

you should never use "apply to enclosed items" on a system drive or on system created folders. that includes the Applications folder, your home directory, your desktop folder etc. Use it only on folders you create yourself. to unlock the external drives you need to run the following terminal commands (copy and paste please)
sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes/"drive name"
sudo chmod 775 /Volumes/"drive name"
Put the name of the affected drive in the above. KEEP the quotes. You'll be prompted to enter your admin password (which you won't see). that's normal.

Unable to change permissions on Hard Disk Drives after rolling back OSX Lion to Snow Leopard

Are you able to help me?
I had several problems with permissions and a series of other serious issues after upgrading to Lion, so I did a clean re-install of Snow Leopard 6.4 (from disk), upgraded to 6.8 and still had permissions problems which I have made worse by doing what I thought made sense - giving my administration user access to all hard disks and time machine back-ups. I emphasise "hard disks" because I have an iMac 27" i7 and 250GB Flash Drive provided by Apple where I keep OSX and aplication files. Thus the Flash Drive (FD) becomes the boot disk, not the Hard Drive.
Changing preferences on the Apple HD (not FD) and the Time Machine Backup HD to my user name (with administration privaleges) has had the reverse effect of not giving me access to anything other than my OSX system volume on my 250GB Flash drive! I can only see my files on the hard drives with the root user (which I have used for the first time ever to get that access). But using the root user does NOT allow me to change permissions of either my Time Machine backup disk or the Hard drive on my iMac ! Why oh why??
Googling for solutions suggested using iRepair to change permissions but that gives me a "boing" when I try with no effect - at least a "boing" is more feedback that the Apple Finder's response to my attempt to alter permissions in the "info" window!
Oh! and of course I have unsuccessfuly tried the Disk Utility as well, which does come back with errors - that appear to be "safe to ignore" from Apple Support's website!
I originally posted a slightly different message to this one to https://discussions.apple.com/message/16955471#16955471 because it appeared to have similar issues. It appears as if my problem is unfortunately quite unique!
Godfrey Bridger
Hamilton, New Zealand

So the background to this situation:
1. The user had OS 10.6.8 installed on one volume, while his actual users home folders stored on a second volume, this is fine but can sometimes cause issues during/post upgrade to 10.7
2. The user upgraded to 10.7 and while his home folders were still being accessed, he no longer had permission to change or modify them.
3. The user downgraded to 10.6.4 again which broke the link for his users completely.
4. In an attempt to change the permissions for his information he had the (common) mistake of changing the permissions of his root level of his drive, this did several things, in addition to negatively effecting his OS, it also locked the drive mount points in his (hidden) /Volumes/ folder.
5. the steps taken to help rectify this issue:
A. Open Terminal.
B. TYPE:
chmod -N /
chmod 1775 /
chown root:admin /
C. Reboot computer
D. Open Disk Utility.
E. Repair permissions on the boot volume.
F. Also the following commands were run on her second drive to allow him access to his stuff again:
sudo chflags -R nouchg /path to drive/
chmod -R 775 /path to drive/
chmod -RN /path to drive/
chown -R username:staff /path to drive/
Once the permissions repair is complete the Users can be readded to the System Preferences>Accounts pane and the paths to home directories located in his second drive using the "Advanced Options..." section, but due to the time the permissions repair was going to take this step will be posted tomorrow.
Also each user will require Terminal commands to make the permissions unique for each user: (this must be done PRIOR to the users being added in System Preferences>Accounts.
chmod -N /
chmod 1775 /
chown root:admin /
sudo chflags -R nouchg /path to home folder/
sudo chmod -R 775 /path to home folder/
sudo chmod -RN /path to home folder/
sudo chown -R username:staff /path to home folder/
EE

Changing permissions on external usb hard drive

This is similar to the other thread about USB hard drive permissions, but I didn't want to hijack.
I just got the USB drive working, as root I can read and write to it.
As user it still automounts, but I don't have read write permissions. Here's some output:
[ali@misbarch ~]$ cd /media/disk
[ali@misbarch disk]$ ls -l
total 16
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2008-05-08 01:14 lost+found
The permissions tab in properties of /disk show:
Owner: root (root)
Access: Read & Write
Group: root
Access: Read only
Others: Read only
So I want to change "Others" to read and write also. I'm not very good with the chmod numbers, I've read the man page, but is that how I would do this? Would a simple
chmod 777 -R /media/disk
be advisable? Or is that just a bad work around and not the proper solution?
Once I got it readable, I copied the info off it as root, and I unmounted it, deleted the partition, created the partition, made an ext3 file system, all as root. Does that have anything to do with it?

stojic wrote:
There is a slightly better solution: change the group of /media/disk to storage, change permissions to 775 and add users that need to be able to write to disk to the storage group (you need to log out and log in that users before changes are visible).
So, as root:
# chgrp storage /media/disk
# chmod 775 /media/disk
# gpasswd -a user_name storage
This way everyone will be able to read the disk, but only root and users in storage group will be able to write to it. Still, if you want everyone to be able to read/write, chmod 777 is a good solution.
Nice solution, thanks, I'm already added to the group storage, but media/disk wasn't part of storage, it was part of root! Thanks for the solution and suggestions.

How do I change the permissions on external drive?

Hi
How do I change "Sharing & Persissions" on an external drive. The drive has a note "You can only read". My account is "read and write" > Fetching is "read and write" and > Everyone is "read only". I want to change Everyone to "read and write".
Thank you
VPH

Try this:
That is if you wnat to open it to everyone.
OT

How do I make changes to an external drive connected to my Mac mini from my Windows 7 PC

I have an external drive which I learned had to be FAT32 for the read write option to be set in the Mac Mini. I did that and moved all the media files back on the external HDD. On the Mac Mini, I shared the 4 folders I needed (Ebooks, Movies, TV Shows, and Transfer). Also on the Mac, I added a user account "Ephraim" because that is the login I have for the WIN7. No Passwords are used right now. The current login being used on the mac is "Media". With the change to FAT32 I have set the permissions on the MAC to Read/ Write for Everybody. Everything listed shows read/write. From the WIN 7 "Ephraim" login, I mapped drives for every folder on Mac external. So, "TV Shows" is drive letter Z:. I can access all the folders/drives to view the files but, still get an error when attempting to change a name or move a file. "You need permission to perform this action. You require permission from the Computer's administrator to make changes to this file". On the Mac and the PC, the user accounts "Media" and "Ephraim" are set to administrator. SMB and AFP are selected under options. Under Get info, permissions show read write. I created a media login on the PC but could not see the mac mini at all. FYI the Mac mini is connected via ethernet.

In addition, I just realized I can make changes to sub folder names and move sub folders in to other sub folders. For Example: I have "Dexter" folder and Sub folders named "Season 1" and "Season 2". I move "Dexter Season 3" into "Dexter" folder, and I change the name to "Season 3". That can be done but I still cannot move a video file from an existing folder or change video file name itself. For example: I cant move a movie file from a sub folder to Gen Pop of the Movie folder, or change the name to my format. I want all files under movies with no other folders present, and I want the name to follow a format (Name Year Ex: "Flight 2012"). I have the mac mini in the living room and need to be able to make changes or additions from my desk, so as to not disturb people who are watching Cable TV by changing the input to work on the Mac files.

Unable to write in an external drive

Hi, everybody:
I am unable to write or work with the material I have in an external drive. I can see it, but nothing more. I see I have only permission for 'Read only' ('Solo puede leer', in Spanish), but I can't change it because there is no 'lock' to open there, or an evident way to do it. And I don't want to touch things in the System Preferences without knowing.
What can I do?
Thank you in advance for your help,
Remedios.

Thank you, Barney-15E. I can't reformat the drive, because I have there a lot of valuable stuff. Stuff I need to work with.
Hey... I'm a little disappointed with this. How is it that this super computer (the iMac is really wonderful, I agree) can't work with a simple hard drive I can use everywhere else..?
Well, anyway, sorry for disturbing you with my problems. Which one, Paragon, Tuxera, you recommend?
Thanks again,
Remedios.

Re-setting Read&Write permissions on external drive?

I have a 40GB external drive on which I backed up my "Documents" on a Windows machine (now discarded). Now that I switched to a Mac (thank God) I would like to use the "old" external drive, but I only have "Read Only" permissions and no lock icon to unlock and reset the disk permissions.
Would greatly appreciate advice on making this disk writable again. Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Veit

Select and right (control) click on the disk icon for the drive. From the contextual menu, select +Get Info+. At the bottom of the info window is +Sharing and Permissions+ where you can change permissions.
However, if the Windows drive is using NTFS, you will only be able to Read it. Mac OS X cannot Write to an NTFS-formatted drive. If this is your situation, you should copy off your valuable data on the drive and reformat it as +Mac OS Extended (Journaled)+ using Disk Utility (Erase tab). Be sure to select the entire DRIVE in the sidebar, and not the volume indented below the drive.

Permissions on external drive

I have been using a Linux based NAS drive for storing media files and this has worked fine under Leopard and Snow Leopard. I have now upgrade to Lion and I can no longer access the folders on the NAS drive. Lion will connect to the drive but the Finder window shows folders with a red & white stop sign. Selecting one of the folders elicits a 'The folder “xxxxx” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents.' I can see the folders and files using the terminal. I have tried connecting the external NAS using SMB and bonjour but get the same result with Finder.
Can anyone provide an explanation as to what has happened during the upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion? Is there a way to reset the permissions so that I can access the files from Finder?
Oddly, iTunes can see the and play the files without a problem.

After MANY frustrating hours of trying everything to regain permission to my external hard drives I found an easy and fast solution. FYI- I'm on Snow Leopard 10.6.8, though I believe this solution will work for anyone on Mac OS X 10.5 or later.
1. Download BatChmod.app (http://www.lagentesoft.com/batchmod/index.html).
2. Click on the "File" button and choose the external drive in question.
3. Under Owner, choose "root" and check all 3 boxes (R, W and X). Under Group, choose "admin" and again check all 3 boxes. Under Everyone, again check all 3 boxes. **make sure you've checked the boxes and not just put a line in them...
4. In Options box, check "Change ownership and privileges," check "Clear ACLs (10.5+)" and check "Unlock." Do not check "Clear xattrs."
5. Finally, DO NOT check the box at the bottom that says "Apply to enclosed folders and files," because this is probably similar to what got you locked out of your own external hard drive in the first place!
6. Click on the "Apply" button.
7. Now open finder and open your external hard drive!

Changing permissions on external HD

I've got an external drive (Simpletech something or other) that I've been using since my Windows days and I'm having issues with it on Arch.
Namely, I can't write to it as a user. I can't chmod it, I can't chown it, opening the dialog box in PCManFM and checking the "write" boxes under permissions, nothing makes a difference. Take a look at this output:
[crew@myhost ~]$ ls -l /media/"Awesome Stuff"
total 32
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2006-12-06 13:39 Diskeeper
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12288 2007-11-28 01:10 Media
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2008-03-28 17:07 RECYCLER
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2008-03-28 16:56 System Volume Information
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1826 2008-03-06 23:50 conkyrc
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 2222 2008-03-05 16:55 conkyrc~
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2009-03-13 11:19 crew2
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2008-10-25 03:20 found.000
[crew@myhost ~]$ sudo chmod 755 /media/"Awesome Stuff"
[crew@myhost ~]$ ls -l /media/"Awesome Stuff"
total 32
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2006-12-06 13:39 Diskeeper
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12288 2007-11-28 01:10 Media
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2008-03-28 17:07 RECYCLER
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2008-03-28 16:56 System Volume Information
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1826 2008-03-06 23:50 conkyrc
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 2222 2008-03-05 16:55 conkyrc~
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 2009-03-13 11:19 crew2
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 0 2008-10-25 03:20 found.000
[crew@myhost ~]$
The permissions literally don't change. What the heck can I do here?

Your hdd's pro'lly using the FAT32 filesystem, which doesn't support linux permissions. But a linux box can't work without permissions, so when the hdd is mounted, virtual permissions are set: All files are owned by the user who mounted the hard drive, and if I'm not mistaken the modes for all files are 644. That's why you can't write files or create new files - you can't change the virtual permissions. A workarround (which I adopted) is to add an entry in /etc/fstab about your hdd and mount it as your user on every reboot.

Unable to move project from external drive back to FCPX.

The HD was recently replaced in my iMac. Fortunately I had backed up my FCPX events and projects to folders on an external drive. I have down loaded FCPX again to the new HD but I'm unable to move my project back into FCPX. Having opened FCPX, I then open the project library, select the external drive, open the folder containing my project but the "current version fcpproject" is grey (not available). I was however able to drag the "fcpevent" file into the event library.
Any help will be appreciated

Since there is no disclosure triangle on your external showing in your project library, there are two possibilities:
1) There are no projects presently located on the drive.
2) Project files are on the drive but FCP can't see them because they are not at the root level of the drive.
So either way, to straighten this out you will have to move some files in the Finder – even though best practices (as both Tom and Luis have pointed out) are to stay within FCP to do that.
Move the existing CurrentVersion file to a temporary folder to hide it from FCP.
Unless you know that the Ball project is at a specific location on your external, do a spotlight search on Final Cut Projects. If something comes up, with FCP closed, navigate to it in the Finder and move it to the root level of the external drive. Then open FCP and it should now be accessible in your project library. Select it in the library; go to File>Move Project. Things should now work.
But if you don't have another copy on your external, open FCP and hot the plus button at the bottom of project library and create a new project. That will create a Final Cut Projects Folder in your Movies folder (which is where it should be in your home directory). Close FCP. Open the temp file and drag the CurrentVersion file that you hid to the Final Cut Projects folder.
Hopefully, you wil now be able to get back to work.
Russ

I am unable to back up to external drive since loading lion

Since installing Lion my Western Digital external drive refuses to cooperate with Time Machine - any thoughts?

Attempting an update without a backup is not a very smart idea.
When was the last time the device was backed up?
What is the exact message when the backup fails?
Personally, I have found that simply ejecting the device, disconnecting then reconnecting resolves random "unable to backup" issues.

Unable to change permissions when connecting over SMB

As of OS 10.9, SMB2 is the default protocol when connecting two Macs running 10.9. Unfortunately, SMB2 seems to be half-baked at this time. Among the issues I've encountered, one of the more vexing ones is that it does not seem to be possible to change permissions on a remote file or directory over SMB. In Finder, the permissions section simply says "you have custom access" regardless of the file/folder's actual permissions. Even if I have full read/write access to the file/folder, I have no way to change its permissions.
chmod and chown also don't work. They don't report an error – they simply don't do anything when I run them on remote files.
If I connect to the same system via AFP, everything works fine and I can change permissions in Finder, and via chmod.
Is anyone else seeing this behavior? Are permissions just broken under SMB2?

So the background to this situation:
1. The user had OS 10.6.8 installed on one volume, while his actual users home folders stored on a second volume, this is fine but can sometimes cause issues during/post upgrade to 10.7
2. The user upgraded to 10.7 and while his home folders were still being accessed, he no longer had permission to change or modify them.
3. The user downgraded to 10.6.4 again which broke the link for his users completely.
4. In an attempt to change the permissions for his information he had the (common) mistake of changing the permissions of his root level of his drive, this did several things, in addition to negatively effecting his OS, it also locked the drive mount points in his (hidden) /Volumes/ folder.
5. the steps taken to help rectify this issue:
A. Open Terminal.
B. TYPE:
chmod -N /
chmod 1775 /
chown root:admin /
C. Reboot computer
D. Open Disk Utility.
E. Repair permissions on the boot volume.
F. Also the following commands were run on her second drive to allow him access to his stuff again:
sudo chflags -R nouchg /path to drive/
chmod -R 775 /path to drive/
chmod -RN /path to drive/
chown -R username:staff /path to drive/
Once the permissions repair is complete the Users can be readded to the System Preferences>Accounts pane and the paths to home directories located in his second drive using the "Advanced Options..." section, but due to the time the permissions repair was going to take this step will be posted tomorrow.
Also each user will require Terminal commands to make the permissions unique for each user: (this must be done PRIOR to the users being added in System Preferences>Accounts.
chmod -N /
chmod 1775 /
chown root:admin /
sudo chflags -R nouchg /path to home folder/
sudo chmod -R 775 /path to home folder/
sudo chmod -RN /path to home folder/
sudo chown -R username:staff /path to home folder/
EE

Unable to access music on external drive

I have recently had to re-install Windows on my laptop - due to a virus. I had previously moved all my music to an external drive and successfully changed itunes to access it there - I changed the location folder in Edit/Preferences/Advanced then held down the shift key whilst launching Itunes thereby getting the option to choose a different library location. I now find that this option no longer appears when I launch Itunes with the shift key held down. I'm using Itunes 6.
Anyone any ideas??
Fortune laptop Windows XP

I've now resolved the issue having found an article by Christopher Breen - in it he suggested -
"If you can locate your music files by rummaging around on your hard drive but iTunes seems dead set against showing them, use the Add to Library command in the File menu to find your music and add it again. Before doing so, open the Advanced tab of iTunes' preferences and make sure that the Copy Files to iTunes Music Folder When Adding to Library option is unchecked. With this option unchecked, song titles will be added to iTunes without the songs themselves being copied to the iTunes Music folder."
I tried this and I got all my albums back even though I lost some of my artwork and all of my playlists.... I can live with that!!

Unable to change permissions on external drive.

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