external hard drives - ownership and permissions issue

stupidly i was messing around with the ownership and permissions of two external hard drives as i had set up a Guest user account on my iMac and didn't want those volumes accessible to them.

however, in not knowing exactly what i was doing *hangs head in shame* i have managed to remove access to these on my account (which is an administrator one) as well. so neither external hard drives mount when i log in as either the Guest or myself.

in Disk Utility these drives do show but the Owners Enabled section says No.

help! ta muchly.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Aug 10, 2007 1:46 PM

19 replies

Sep 3, 2007 2:29 PM in response to Pevilleuk

I had a simlar problem but with an extra internal drive. You need to login as a super administrator, by following the instructions in this link.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh1549.html

You might also need to adjust the login window to allow for the 'other' user login option. To do this go to system preferences, accounts, login options, and tick show input menu at login. This will allow the option to login as other - root.

When you login as the root administrator you can then adjust the access options for any of the drives, and this hopefully should effect all users; it did in my case!

Good luck if you still need it, as i know you posted your problem awhile ago!

baltwo

Level 9

62,396 points

Sep 3, 2007 4:18 PM in response to semidivine

*I have an external hard drive that I set up to be bootable, but basically hold all my music.*

It won't boot unless it has an operating system on it. From what you posted, it only has music on it.

Oct 10, 2007 9:45 AM in response to Darkerbright

I'm completely new to Macs, and I have the same issue, that I can't write to my external hard drive. I've tried going through the NetInfo Manager, but there's no security tag there. I would appreciate step-by-step instructions as I'm used to Windows and not used to OsX. However, Macs rock, so I won't be going back 🙂

Király

Level 6

10,035 points

Oct 11, 2007 12:18 AM in response to cartoon_boy

If you were using the drive with Windows and it is formatted NTFS, you won't be able to write to it with a Mac. Reformat it HFS+ for Mac use or FAT32 for dual Mac/Windows use.

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external hard drives - ownership and permissions issue