logging into a mac hard drive with ubuntu

If you running the OS under Linux, then you need to ask a Linux forum how to manage that.
The files themselves on the disk do not control who has access--they are tagged by the OS to determine the proper access, but the OS handles the task of limiting the access.

Being that Linux is a flavor of *nix, I would assume if you login as the username that owns the files, you should be able to copy them.

Is it FileVault protected?
If not, then there is no password that you can "take off."

If it is FileVault protected, I don't know of anything that might work to decrypt the file.

Message was edited by: Barney-15E

yes you can- the command is called chmod, and it changes file permissions.

I won't go into detail about how it works- just google 'chmod' and you can find lots of information, but for your case, you probably only need to know this:

sudo chmod -R 777 /Users/<you>


Just type that into terminal, provide your password, and the permissions on every file in /Users/<you> should be changed to 'free for all'

In case you want to know,

sudo means run with administrative privileges

-R means apply command recursively to every subdirectory and file in the directory

777 means rwxrwxrwx means that anybody has the permissions to read, write and execute the files

/Users/<you> can be changed to anything you want, in fact if you're running off live cd it might be /Volumes/MacintoshHD/Users/<you>, i'm not sure how it works, you might want to check.
If you're daring enough you could just apply it to / which means everything in the filesystem although that might mess up some system files, so I wouldn't recommend it.

Hope that helped.

I forgot to mention, you can also run the exact same command in ubuntu, except change the directory to

/media/<your mac hdd name>/Users/<you>

and use your ubuntu password which in a live cd should be nothing.

samseo246 wrote:
my macbook wont boot up and right now i am running off of a live ubuntu cd, and
when i go to computer, my mac partition shows up, and i want to move my picture/docs/movies from that partition to my flash drive, but i dont have the require permissions, is there a way i can override the permissions that will let me access to the locked folders?

Are you using the sudo command in ubuntu?