to my three supplemental internal hard drives (Mac Pro), one of which, if locked, won't allow Photoshop to launch. The three drives are locked and the error message says " you do not have sufficient privileges (something to that effect). So, I confirmed that I am recognized as 'administrator' and created a second administrator account from scratch - still no luck. I used 'get info' for each of the drives and noted that in every case access is denoted by 'custom' when it seems to me that 'read and write' is appropriate. Unfortunately, there is no response when I, as administrator, attempt to change options for each of the locked drives. I have a couple of OSX Leopard books that I've consulted and, at least as of now, haven't found anything beyond what I've already tried, that could help me. Then I remembered that there are at least 3-4 of you guys here who probably already recognize what's happening. Thanks in advance for any feedback.
I should add that these three drives weren't part of a RAID array. I did the disk verification procedure for each. Unfortunately the repair permissions function was not available, presumably because the drives are locked and I don't have permission to execute that function in them. Early on I did the restart thing with no results. Ultimately I even did a clean install of the OS then installed all the available updates to reach 10.5.6 etc. I may have tried a few other ways but nothing worked.
its a permissions issue... very easy to solve quickly with terminal commands... not so easy to explain in a web forum with no knowledge of exactly how those drives are setup and what they contain. Get a local Mac or Unix guru to take a look and assist you. Setting permissions in the Get Info panel rarely seems to fully work as expected. And you can't set the "execute" privilege from that dialog... and that's probably part of the problem here. Execute determines whether or not you can enter a folder or run a program file. If these drives contain ONLY data and you don't care if anyone can access anything on them... the following will give READ/WRITE/EXECUTE privileges to EVERYTHING on the drive.:
in Terminal type:
sudo chmod -R 777 /volumes/nameofdrive
And press return
You'll be given a warning about the dangers of using sudo and be prompted for an admin password. After entering your password and pressing return the permissions of everything on the drive will be set to read/write/execute for anyone. DON'T RUN THIS ON YOUR SYSTEM DRIVE... only a drive that contains only data where you don't care about permissions.
Note if your drive name contains spaces or special characters you have to proceed each of those characters with a \. For example a drive named "My Drive" would be written in the command above as my\ drive. The names are not case sensitive.
Repair Permissions won't work on those drives. That command only works on the system drive and it only repairs permissions of system files... essentially things Apple knows about. It has nothing to do with the locked status of those drives. It won't fix issues with permissions on your data files (disks) or on files related to third party programs.
I've seen this sort of thing happen a few times. It's never been caused by OS updates, but may see it if I move a non system disk to a different system or to a different interface. I most typically see it with shared volumes where something has changed regarding the volume setup. In theory none of the permissions should change but for some reason they sometimes seem to.
I had a situation today where I moved two drives from an external firewire case who's power supply was failing to internal ATA connections on the same machine... an old G4 that I use as a backup server. One of the drives made the move without incident. The other had numerous subfolders with hosed permissions. The result was that I couldn't access those folders. (note: The two drives were put on separate ATA buses) I reset the owner and reset the owner's permissions on every folder on the disk from the command line...and all was back to normal very quickly. Why was this needed? Who knows. But the fix is very easy and fast.
Bob - Thanks for your replies. I had suspected the repair permissions was somehow not applicable to these supplementary drives, noticed I did have that option on my primary system and applications drive, but have recently converted from PC to Mac, wasn't certain. Thanks for confirming that.
The three drives are strictly data drives. I used one for personally backing up special items and such. Time Machine used one and the third one was Photoshop's scratch disc. One of my books, Mac OS X Leopard, Beyond the Manual by Myers and Lee details in two well-written chapters accessing Darwin (Unix underpinnings of OS) through the Terminal program, shell scripting and more. The File Permissions and Attributes section seems most in line with your suggestions. I will pursue this up to the limit of my understanding and beyond that I guess I'll need a local consultant.
Noel - Thanks for your reply. I wish I could tell you what happened but I don't know for sure. What I do know is that before noticing the locked drives I downloaded a trial version GIF animation program from Boxtop Software. I was unable to launch the program after installation and while investigating I discovered the locked hard drives. I do wonder if there is a correlation but cannot be sure. Ironically, the message I get upon attempting to launch the program is about... a permission error. If there is a clue here, please let me know.
I really appreciate the knowledge base you guys have!
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