Why lock a hard drive?

When you are in a finder window and you selected "get info" on a hard drive, down at Ownership and Permissions there is a lock for the Hard Drive. What is this used for?

Hi, B.
See "Mac OS X 10.4 Help: Setting permissions for disks, folders, and files" which mentions the specific lock you note in the Details sub-panel of the Ownership & Permissions panel.
That lock is used in cases where you are not authorized to change the permissions on the specific object whose Get Info window is open. For example, the Home folder of another user. If you cannot make selections in the pop-up menus in the Details panel because they are unavailable or "greyed-out," clicking the lock and making changes would then prompt you for an Admin account and password on that Mac to authenticate the changes.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

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Have you emptied your trash lately...
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Why is my hard drive full of backups?
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http://pondini.org/TM/30.html

Why is my hard drive full when I only have the operating system loaded and nothing else? No pics, music, nothing...It's the 60 Gig hard drive on the air built in late 2010.

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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509
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It's dying.
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Hard drive is not spinning.
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Sluggish loading of applications.
System freezes and hangs.
An interesting site - Hard Drive Sounds by drive manufacturer.

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Looks like it's going down a bit!?
BTW, OSX can mark off a lot of space that doesn't show up anywhere to defrag big files.
Might be an errant growing System file, not sure what you used to clear caches, but I think this one does it better...
At this point I think you should get Applejack...
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19596
After installing, reboot holding down CMD+s, (+s), then when the DOS like prompt shows, type in...
applejack AUTO
Then let it do all 5 of it's things.
At least it'll eliminate some questions if it doesn't fix it.
The 5 things it does are...
Correct any Disk problems.
Repair Permissions.
Clear out Cache Files.
Repair/check several plist files.
Dump the VM files for a fresh start.

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I can open "About This MAC" and click on more info it lets me check my hard disk usage under storage. It shows I have 81 GB available of 499.76. However it shows 98 GB of Backups, what could that be?
Now when I actually right click on Macintosh HD it says I have 437.22 GB available of 499.25 GB. I just don't understand, and I don't believe either is right. If I right click my user file in MAcintosh HD it says I have 165 GB on disc. What gives?

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
That's normal. OS X Lion and Mountain Lion, when you have turned on Time Machine, create "local snapshots" on the hard drive of portable Macs. See > http://pondini.org/TM/30.html
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Hey all,
I've noticed that everytime i plug in my hard drive, a selection of files end up in the trash, and these are files that i have not deleted. i made the mistake of emptying the trash and lost a whole lot of files from my hard drive.
when i unplug the hd the files are no longer in the trash, but when i plug it back in the trash is full. this is a problem because the files i do delete to free up the space on my hd seem to end up in the trash with files that i havent deleted at all, and the only way to free up space on my hd is to empty the trash. how can i resolve this problem of making sure only the files i delete are in the trash and not importrant unselected files?? Help!

Why do you even think it needs defraginng, your iMac is not an old MS Windows machine?. Defragging HD's is a very antiquated and unneccessary thing to do. Even current MS Windows machines don't need it.

Why is my hard drive split up like this?

Ok so my hard drive is split up into five different parts. I have a 1 TB by the way. They are:
the C: drive-902 GB
Unallocated-28GB
Hidden 400MB
System 260MB
Hidden 391MB
Anyway can anyone tell me why its split up that way? Can I somehow allocate the 28Gb to the c drive? And what are the hidden drives?
If you need more info let me know. I'm trying to learn as much about computers as possible because I want to work in IT someday and right now i just don't know what info is relevent. BTW I'm running windows 8 64 bit.
Thanks!
REALteetz

Hi
Please find the link given below might help you to fix your issue.
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-use-unallocated-drive-space-in-windows.html
Let us know how it goes!
"I work for HP."
****Click the (purple thumbs up icon in the lower right corner of a post) to say thanks****
****Please mark Accept As Solution if it solves your problem****
Regards
Manjunath

Why lock a hard drive?

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