Locked External Hard Drives

Question

Locked External Hard Drives

I'm running a Mac Mini as a file server and about every two months it locks all hard drives that are attached to it. They will not grant me permission to access them, even when trying to change the permissions in the "Get Info" window. Disk utility tells me that they are working fine, but I still cannot get access. The only way to get access to them is to re-format them and erase all contents.
This only happens to the hard drives on the Mini, not on the hard drives attached to my 5 other Macs.
Apple replaced the Mini a couple of months ago since it was under warranty and in for repair for this 3 times prior, but it now happening with the new Mini. Any ideas by anyone?

MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, PowerBook G4, iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.4), Also running Adobe CS3 and Microsoft Office 2008

Posted on Sep 15, 2008 5:39 PM

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Answer 1

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

Sep 15, 2008 6:01 PM in response to James Meister

I don't know why this would happen but you can try unlocking them from terminal by running the following commands

sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes/"name of drive"

sudo chmod 775 /Volumes/"name of drive"
\\

Put the name of the affected drive in the above. Keep the quotes. You'll have to enter your admin password (which you won't see). that's normal.

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Answer 2

Sep 16, 2008 8:41 PM in response to V.K.

I was having a related problem -- all of my external drives and my second internal drive were locked up after I fooled around with permissions. Doing this worked, but I want to add that after running these commands, I had to do a "Get Info" on each drive, click on the lock icon, which prompted me for my admin password. Then the drives became unlocked for me.

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Answer 3

Sep 19, 2008 5:17 AM in response to V.K.

OMG you saved me - I had 500GB of video files on an external HD that locked up all of a sudden. Thank you for the code, you are a lifesaver...

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