External Drive Ownership

Question

Darren 2007 Author

Level 1

4 points

External Drive Ownership

I just setup an external drive (via FW800) for my MBP. I would like to turn off security for the drive so my two user accounts can share every file on the drive. Disk Utility information tells me the following:

Name : Data
Type : Volume

Disk Identifier : disk1s2
Mount Point : /Volumes/Data
File System : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Connection Bus : FireWire
Device Tree : /PCI0/PCIB@1E/FRWR@3/node@30e002e0701035/sbp-2@c000/@0:2
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : A3A0323D-E2EB-3E6F-9F8C-6E538D07F2E6
Capacity : 698.3 GB (749,812,400,128 Bytes)
Free Space : 552.1 GB (592,766,619,648 Bytes)
Used : 146.3 GB (157,045,780,480 Bytes)
Number of Files : 57,810
Number of Folders : 4,317
Owners Enabled : Yes
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Repair Permissions : No
Can Be Verified : Yes
Can Be Repaired : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : Yes
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 2

How can I turn owners off? I have read of others seeing an option in Disk Utility to accomplish this, but I cannot find that option (perhaps I overlooked it??).

Any suggestions?

 MacBookPro  G4 Tower  iPod Nano, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Nov 11, 2007 9:42 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Niel

Level 10

726,539 points

Nov 11, 2007 9:54 AM in response to Darren 2007

Select the drive in the Finder, choose Get Info from the File menu, and put a check in the box 'Ignore ownership on this volume'.

(25838)

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Answer 2

Darren 2007 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 11, 2007 10:58 AM in response to Niel

Unfortunately, that option does not appear 😟

Btw - I am on OSX 10.5

It does show a "sharing and permissions" with an add/remove button. When I press the + sign (add) it crashes the info page. The logs show the following message...

11/11/07 10:55:42 AM com.apple.launchd[2612] (0x10a110.Locum[3747]) Exited: Terminated
11/11/07 10:55:42 AM com.apple.launchd[2612] ([0x0-0x1bc1bc].com.apple.finder[2629]) Exited abnormally: Bus error

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Answer 3

Darren 2007 Author

Level 1

4 points

Nov 11, 2007 11:14 AM in response to Darren 2007

I figured it out, or at least the backdoor way of doing this. The option still does not appear on the Info page, but owners are now disabled.

The following article talks about how to ENABLE ownership. From that I figured out how to DISABLE ownership.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108006

vsdbutil -c /Volumes/MyDrive/
sudo vsdbutil -d /Volumes/MyDrive/
vsdbutil -c /Volumes/MyDrive/

The first command displays the current status. My status read "No entry found".
The second command disables (-d) ownership on the drive.
The third command confirms the new status. My status now reads "Permissions are disabled".

Message was edited by: DM2006

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Answer 4

jwaite

Level 1

0 points

Nov 12, 2007 6:51 PM in response to Darren 2007

You just saved my life -- my iTunes library is on an external drive, and some of the permissions were borked, which prevented me from accessing files. With this, I now have access to the drive again. Thanks a lot!

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