Suddenly OSX 10.5.6 won't allow access...

[Buddy Thomason]

Originally Posted by BobSmith

This is why I don't like giving brief online answers to problems like this.

Bob - I understand your position and I take full responsibility for my gear and its problems. You've been a great help and I've learned a few important things as a result. There's no harm done and I'm better off than I was before your input. Thanks again!

[larry_angier]

Simple solution (just did this twice), but it will take a bit of time and lots of hard drive space...

In the utilities is a program called "Directory Utility". You will need to create a "root" user, log out and log back in as "root".

This will allow total access and then some. Be fully sober and don't do this while tired or taking meds. You will become the "god" of the computer and can really foul things up...

You will be able to read and write as the Root User. However, until you back up all the data on each of the external drives, reformat them and then restore each drive, the only way you can access the data is as the "root user".

This happened twice with our iMac 24 inch... the drive was going the first time and during 10.5.x updating, it locked up the two external drives that were mounted during at the time.

The internal drive did die and was replaced back to square one with Apple and I did the updates back from square one and restored the files. However, the external drives were attached and mounted and they got locked up again.

In the process of fixing (which took several days to do the file transfers (1.5 GB on one drive, 750 MB on the other), I ended up having to buy a couple of external drives to do the back-up. One is now the dedicated "Time Machine" for the internal drive...

Basically, you will need to mount the drives as the Root User, back each up (one at a time is fine), reformat the drive, restore the files, then eventually, log out as the Root User and and back in as yourself, the humble human user again.

It will take many hours, but it can be fixed.

Your results may vary. Work safely and good luck!

[Buddy Thomason]

Larry - Thanks! Unfortunately the root user approach failed as well. Your description of the lengthy process you went through was sobering to say the least. I was lucky to dodge that bullet (see below).

What finally worked was un-seating and re-seating all four drives and then, for the three non-system drives, re-formatting and partitioning them. The lock symbols disappeared and the drives could be opened. I immediately backed up my primary drive to one of the other drives using Time Machine. This resulted in a flawless backup without errors.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 and InDesign CS4 still had the permission problem and wouldn't open. I simply re-installed both programs and each launched without a glitch.

In talking this over with Apple Care, the first line person was not equipped to deal with the problem so I wound up speaking with someone up-stream who was much more fluent concerning OSX 10.5.6. Despite the fact that I found some user to user forum entries describing the same problem, he claimed not to have seen my particular situation before. He e-mailed me a data capture program which I ran and sent back to him so he could send it to the relevant software engineers for analysis of the various event logs or whatever since it is by no means clear what caused such confusion in the OS. Should anything interesting come back from the engineers he promised to forward it on to me and I'll post it here.

I sure have appreciated everyone's input.