Changing ownership and group settings

I made a back up of my OS X on an external LaCie drive and the owner was changed on my iBook System Preferences to System (the group is Wheel). I went to System Preferences and changed the owner to Admin (does the group need to be admin?) but the lock does not appear in System Preferences. Is there more I need to do? Do I need to change the owner on all applications to Admin?

I was reviewing previous post and found this but not sure if it applies to my situation. Any help would appreciated.

Mike
--------------------------
May I butt in Michael?

Soliel,

First, click on the icon (on your Desktop) for this external drive (or any one of the "partitions," if it is partitioned into multiple "volumes" that mount individually on your Desktop), then press
b Apple-I
to open a Getinfo window for it.

In this window, click on "Details" in the "Ownership and Permissions" section. Look for the button that reads "Ignore ownership on this volume" and make sure that it is not checked. If there are multiple "volumes," do this for each one.

Next, open
b /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.
At the prompt copy and paste this text into the Terminal window:

sudo chown -R `id -u`:`id -g`

Now, type a trailing space after the text you pasted in. Make sure that you type at least one (it won't matter if you type more, as long as there is at least one). Next, drag the icon of the external disk (or "partition") from your Desktop to the Terminal window. As Michael has said earlier, this will automatically fill in the "full path" to that disk (or partition). The results should look something like this:

sudo chown -R `id -u`:`id -g` /Volumes/some diskname

Finally, press <RETURN>. You will be asked for your admin password (you must be an admin user to use these instructions). Enter your admin password (it will not be echoed, and you will see no indication that you have typed anything), then again press <RETURN>. When you return to the prompt, quit Terminal.

This should fix it up, unless there is more wrong with it. We can cross that bridge if and when we come to it.

Scott

p.s. Oops, after you have followed these instructions, you must restart your Finder. Either log out and back in again, or press
b Option-Apple-Esc
and choose "Relaunch Finder." -s

iBook G4, 1.42 GHz PowerPC, SuperDrive, Mac OS X (10.4.10), 60G Hard Drive, 1G RAM, FW 320GB External Drive

Posted on Jul 15, 2007 3:21 PM

21 replies

Jul 18, 2007 9:27 AM in response to mschi

Mike

the lock icon in the lower left of the System Preferences window is no longer there

OK, so you're basically back to square one.

Let's be clear. There is no lock icon in the System Preferences window on anyone's machine, not just yours. So that is not a problem.

Perhaps you mean the lock icon is missing on one or more of the Preference Panes? For example, the "Accounts" preference pane should have a lock. You need to be much more precise, otherwise no one can help you.

verify my application Owner settings are OK

Most of the Apple applications in the root level Applications folder are owned by system, group admin. System Preferences is an exception in that the group is wheel. Other applications you have installed may have you as the owner. If you have run Repair Permissions, you should not need to worry about this: they should all be correct.

mschi Author

Level 1

0 points

Jul 18, 2007 12:50 PM in response to Michael Conniff

Mike,
I'm still somewhat new to the Mac world so please forgive my lack of preciseness.

The lock icon was, but is no longer visible in any of my preference panes. What do I need to do to correct this? Is this a thread that should be posted under a different forum? Let me know. Thanks.

Mike

mschi Author

Level 1

0 points

Jul 18, 2007 4:46 PM in response to mschi

Repair permissions did the trick. Thank you for your help.

Mike

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Jul 18, 2007 4:53 PM in response to mschi

Thanks for the feedback. Another book is the recently published O'Reilly text bash cookbook by Albing, Vossen, and Newham. Good computing.

G4 450 MP Gigabit 1.5 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Jul 20, 2007 7:49 PM in response to Michael Conniff

Thanks for the correction; for some reason I thought that Disk Utility read the permissions from the boot disk, and thus would not work on another drive...

Perhaps it was just the wording in the knowledge base article http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751

especially the section devoted to warning users against using an Install disc when repairing permissions.

I'll try to be more careful from now on.

Jul 21, 2007 5:50 AM in response to Etidorhpa

Etidorhpa

Perhaps it was just the wording in the knowledge base article

Yes, it is a bit brief. Part of the problem is that there are three different disk sources to consider for different things. First there is the Disk Utility application. This may be more up to date on the Hard Disk. Secondly there is the /Library/Receipts folder on the target disk. The third source is a "Hintfile" to be found in the DiskManagement.framework, on the disk from which the system is booted. This file will almost certainly be more up to date on the Hard Disk, and this, together with the first item, is why the KB article is worded the way it is.

Of course in the normal run of things all three sources are the same 🙂

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Changing ownership and group settings