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

Question

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

Answer 1

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