Locked folders on my External Hard Drive

There are problems with Leopard and with PCI controllers; with external drives (it helps to get specific, as in "Maxtor One-Touch" or whatever it is).

Almost always with ANY OS update (10.4, .5, etc) "breaking" things. A USB or FireWire bridge, a partition format, the firmware of the device.

LaCie, SIIG, FirmTek, ACard, Sonnet.... Apple always makes changes, and it is often a surprise when the OS ships.

It is next to impossible to keep up - or watch - messages fly by on 10.5 Discussion. Some sites try to list and quantify what they can confirm that needs to be updated or compatible.

xlr8yourmac, macintouch, macfixit, to name three popular sites.

I take it as a given that I will backup, reformat, and restore every disk drive eventually with a new OS. For now, though, my external SATA drives and Sonnet controller don't get along so I still use 10.4.11 and have Leo on 'standby' test hard drive (along with Windows).

I would upgrade 10.4.5 to 10.4.11 and put Leopard aside until you know why, and never upgrade to a new OS and expect it to not have issues.

Hi

I also have the same problem. If anyone knows how to help then please let me know asap as this is driving me crazy!

Thanks

Rich

Hi, I have the same problem. Just bought an iMac with Leopard. When I connected an external drive to it, some files were locked and I have no idea how to unlock them. For example, my music folder is locked, so my iTunes cannot access the files in that folder.

Same problem here.... nobody has come up with a solution. Its killing me. I love macs but they are so quirky when it comes to issues like this...

Found this solution on one of the forums:
Boot up into Windows, go into command prompt.
At the prompt type attrib -r +s "D:\My Documents"
or whatever your locked folder name is.
Boot up in Leopard - Voila, folder is now fully accessible.

Try copy folder to same partition, and then you can change Lock to Unlock file/folder. Work for me.

What if you don't have Windows loaded onto your system? I used to use this external drive on XP a year ago. But have switched over to MAC. I was using 10.4.5 and upgraded to Leopard. Now I'm having these problems on the xternal drive only. Do i have to fix it in XP Command prompts? It worked fine in 10.4.... ?

i have the same problem, and i am frustrated!! i thought macs were supposed to be easy!
we need a solution for locked folders on external drives. an easy solution!

Hi guys had the same problem with an external drive full of music folders created on my old windows machine, have found a simple solution (always the best) try this, hope it helps!! Locate the locked folder, now right click and select get info, now at this point when you try to deselect the locked tick nothing happens, so look down to the bottom right hand corner and you will notice a small gold padlock, click on this (if you cant see it click on sharing and permissions, when you click the padlock it will ask you to input your password (this is the same password you would use to log into your computer) once you do this you will find you can now deselect the locked tick... simple when you know how 🙂

Hmm, this is not looking as you describe. My get info has no "small gold padlock" in the "right hand corner". There is a grey (locked) padlock in the lower left corner of the folder icon beneath "preview". Under "sharing and permissions", it says "You can only read", but that's all. No other words or graphics there. Am I looking in the wrong place?

It's not a simple solution, but are you all willing to give this one a try. It may just do what you are wanting.

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=43335

Note: In 10.5.2 I can't see the flags they are talking about with "ls -lo", but the commands should still work.

Acutally seanybdj is absolutely correct, you must be the admin on the Mac you are using...and if you are, simply right-click on the folder or select the folder in Finder and go to File > Get Info (Command-I). In this menu you will see under the "General" section there is a checkbox for "Locked" (checked if your folder is locked into read-only). Now, you will also see at the bottom of this window a section named "Saring & Permissions". This is where the GOLD lock is located (bottom-right). Click this gold lock and input your password; again you must be the admin in order to do this. After successfully entering your password you may uncheck the locked checkbox in "General". Problem solved. Note: I'm using Leopard OS X.

Hi,

You people seem to know more than my "genius bar" son. He locked his entire hard drive by right clicking on the icon, going to "get info", and changed read and write to no access.

All the icons disappeared.

He restarted the computer and now only gets a blue screen. Presumably because he has access to nothing.

Does anyone know how to get access back?

thanks

So I try to do what the other users said to do...but I can't find the gold lock and when I click on the sharing and permission nothing happens. I would like to get these files off my finace hard drive...but nothing seem to work and I don't have Window on my computer.

When I put the files on my computer I can unlock them but that is not what I want to do.

Does anyone else know what to do?

Same problem, and the last post in this thread worked for me:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5750499