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Wiremonkey Author

Level 1

4 points

"don't have permission to see its contents"

Greetings,

I'm really having problems with this Snow Leopard, and don't want to be agitated, or frustrated, but it's getting harder and harder to do so.

After installing on my 17" Macbook Pro, I was able to log in, fine, but was unable to do much of anything, as I was prompted to give a administrator password, but had no idea of what this was.

After trying every combination of my name (which has been my user name from before time), and pass work, I got it in my head that "this messing ain't cutting it."

After a bit of looking here on the forum, I was able to find out how to use my install disc to crate a "system administrator" account, and then, after restarting from my hard drive, I was able to go into the system preferences, find my users, and give myself permissions to act as an administrator (after this, I read several posts about how it's scary to crate an administrator account -- and it was -- but just tried to be strong -- channeling bit of strength from an alligator I once saw eat a big chunk of old truck tire, and just pressed on).

Now I should note that while I was log in as the (scary) administrator, I did seem that I was able to open folders without issue, however, when I logged back in as me (the monkey of wire), nothing much had changed, I could not open any folders with exception of "public" and something else like that...

The warning I get is ""don't have premission to see its contents" -- wow, I can't even look?

Frightening.

And, what scares me even more, is that I can go back in my time machine and see things that I would like to bring forward, but when I try to, I'm told "this is part of OS X and can't be modified... " or something close to that... Don't worry about this issue right now, I think it might be tied to the "no permission" deal, but if I've lost those back ups... Well, we all know what that feeling is like, and I will be feeding parts of my grays anatomy to said "Alligator."

So, while I'm here, what about just going back to OSX plain old Leopard?

Can I do this if I do a reset to factory install?

Will that boot out all the snow?

And if so, what I fear is that I have already corrupted my time machine drive with a back up done while this Snow Leopard OS installed... Yeah, when I plugged in the drive to check what it's staturse was, the Macbook just jumped in and performed a new back up -- of this state of affaires.... Scary again.

I was thinking I might be able to go into the drive and erase this one (or perhaps two) backups, but then when I looked there is a document that's very new -- like just at the time this back up was being done -- and it's called something catalog, I think, and I have a gut wrenching feeling that to erase that would be the beginning of a horror show... So, let me not go there just yet...

Wow, that's a lot... Any help on this would just be awesome.

I honestly just rock out hard no my apple products, I'm a long time user, and always do things carefully and with thought, but this is very underwater frozen under the snow black water gator **** for me right this moment in time.

Thank you,
WM

MacBook Pro 17", Mac OS X (10.6), machine is 2.5 years old

Posted on Aug 30, 2009 7:51 PM

113 replies

Oct 18, 2010 8:22 PM in response to instageek

Thank you thank you thank you!

I had insanely applied permissions to enclosed items to my entire hard drive (epic noob!), Armageddon, rivers of blood, cats and dogs living together. And my extra hard drives were all locked and lonely, reverted to ugly HD photo icons (Apple, buh?), sulking in their corners.

Saved by instageek in one google search. Thank you!

Pie for you!

Nov 5, 2010 12:28 PM in response to instageek

Wow! I though going back to Mac was going to be simple. Thank god I kept my PC. My plug-in USB drives are inaccessible as no matter what I do, I cannot get permission to use them. I can't set up the time machine, Xtreme base station wont work remotely, so now I am copying back all my media server files to the PC to run PS3 and ORB and leaving the MAC 27" for surfing only, making this a $1700 computer screen! Snow Leopard? Yes I got snowed. And yes, I reinstalled the system files and yes I have followed all advice above except Terminal programming, because I don't want to render the machine useless by accident, considering it is already working against me at every turn.

Why doesn't Apple give you an option to turn off all this security? Inside my firewall and anti-viral barriers, I should be allowed to use and network my computer without being a programmer!!!!

lamier

Level 1

0 points

Nov 19, 2010 6:33 PM in response to Wiremonkey

sudo chflags 0 /Volumes/Volumename <HIT RETURN/ENTER HERE> (don't type this part in Terminal.
sudo chown 0:80 /Volumes/Volumename <HIT RETURN/ENTER HERE>
sudo chmod 775 /Volumes/Volumename <HIT RETURN/ENTER HERE>
sudo chmod -N /Volumes/Volumename <HIT RETURN/ENTER HERE>

These commands worked for me. Thanksssssss!!!!!

After hours searching every were you had the right answer.

Nov 20, 2010 10:01 AM in response to Wiremonkey

The info on this thread got me headed in the right direction, but didn't have the specific info I needed.

So, I am posting my specific scenario and solution, in case others have a case like mine. In the end, the Terminal program was the key. I found information from four different web site forums and distilled enough info to get my drive back.

I bought a Mac Pro from a friend. Wiped out the drives and loaded the OS. After I was up and running, I realized I wanted to change the "short name" of the Mac Pro. Huge mistake. I read about creating a new Admin account and then deleting the old one. It kinda worked, but every folder I went to in my secondary, internal hard drive had permissions that had to be changed. Like a dork, I started using the "Apply to enclosed items" command related to changing permissions in the drive's info tab. Huger mistake! Using Disk Utility to repair permissions just couldn't undo the mess I made. It probably wouldn't have been as bad if I hadn't re-booted in frustration at one point when I probably shouldn't have.

To bring a long story to an end, I had to reload the entire OS but then found myself locked out of this 500GB internal drive. Keep in mind this was not the boot drive - just a second internal drive for extra storage space.

So, here are the details of my system:
My system short-name: MacPro2x266
My internal hard drive name: 500GB HD 1 (note the spaces in the name)
My OS: 10.6.5 (with all software updates)
My machine: Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 9GB RAM, 120GB SSD boot drive

First I tried the following command in Terminal, because I read that if your drive name has spaces, you add the parentheses: _sudo chown -R MacPro2x266:admin "Volumes/500GB HD 1"_
It didn't work, and I suspected the spaces and parentheses were the problem.

I read that back-slashes need to be put in before spaces.
So I tried this: _sudo chown -R MacPro2x266:admin /Volumes/500GB\ HD\ 1_
It didn't work, but this time I got "Operation not permitted". This lead me to believe I was on the right track, but there was some permission issue to be addressed. Searching the Internet lead me to discussions of the "uchg" flag. I read in some posts that if the "uchg" flag is set, you will get the "Operation not permitted" error like I did. The _ls -alO /Volumes_ command showed the volume summary, and in there, I could see the uchg flag. I knew I was on to something.

So I tried this:
_chflags nouchg /Volumes/500GB\ HD\ 1_
Got the "Permission denied" error.

I found some info on that, and as a result I tried this instead:
_sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes/500GB\ HD\ 1_
It worked! The lock symbol on the drive icon went away! Joy!

Then I was able to change permissions in the "Get Info" tab so that I have the "Read & Write" privilege on that drive. Before this fix, I could change the permission, but it would immediately jump back to "Custom". It would never stay on "Read & Write". Now, all is well. My dork status is gone and we will never speak of this again!

Best of luck to you all.

Dec 14, 2010 3:11 PM in response to instageek

Thanks. This works like a charm for my drives with one word titles. I have a drive that is ;labeled "Mike's iMac Media". So when I try to enter this name, Terminal seems to not recognize the command at all. I suspect it has to do with my use of the ' character in the first name "Mike's". So how can I fix this?

Thanks!

Mike

Jan 11, 2011 1:18 PM in response to Wiremonkey

I just spent several hours on the phone with an Apple Specialist and we discovered that if you can get to your terminal application, you can type in the following command to fix this problem:
sudo chflags nouchg (at this point, drag and drop the drive you would like to change the settings for making sure there is a space after the "g") hit return

You will get a message that tells you that you want to ensure that you have the path correct, if you do, then hit return and you will be asked for your password. This is your system password. It may look like nothing happened when you typed in the password, but that should be fine. Then go to the drive, click "Get Info" and you should now be able to change the settings on the permissions for the drive. Once you restart your computer, you should be able to see, read and write to the drives that were previously locked.

This worked like a charm for me after several attempts to fix the problem using other suggestions on the forums.

Jan 25, 2011 4:07 PM in response to Seth Hodge

This really saved the day.
I was using an old backup from Time Machine that was done on an external hard drive and found this to be the saving grace when I was going out of my mind.
Thank you for posting this!
Scott

gmehje

Level 1

0 points

Jan 31, 2011 4:22 PM in response to Wiremonkey

Wow! It worked.
Huge, huge thanks to all who have posted here. Using Terminal is very scary but it works.
One thing to note (at least with me):
When it ask for your password you don't get any confirmation that anything has happened - so best to have your 'get info' window open at the same time and you will hopefully see the lock symbol disappear automatically!

Many thanks
G

Mar 21, 2011 7:26 PM in response to Seth Hodge

Seth - you are an angel. Your input worked great for me - I am able to access my drive to get data from it.

TY sir for taking the time to post.

Rob MacGregor

Mar 26, 2011 1:42 PM in response to Marilyn_Sand

You so seriously just saved my life! I have no idea why this happened, but one day I started getting that error, and all ownerships had custom privileges. It would not change at all. It was happening to my Time Machine Backups disk, as well as my Drobo, regardless of what computer they were plugged into.

Mar 27, 2011 8:19 AM in response to instageek

Instageek,

What do you change if the drive has two words in name AND and apostrophe? It is named ...

Chip's Drive

jstjck

Level 1

0 points

Jun 1, 2011 10:18 PM in response to instageek

First of all - a thanks to instageek for the step by step instructions; much appreciated.

I went to Genius Bar for my MBP failing to burn discs. Was told to do a fresh install & retry. This I did, using my Time Machine BU to restore all my stuff. Except it seemingly missed some things in my download folder.

When I tried to restore these from within TM, I got the "don't have permission message" and a red circle with each folder. Unfortunately, I couldn't fix the folder permissions from within TM and after trying the terminal instructions here without success, I was seemingly at a loss. (I didn't want to play with terminal too much as I don't know what I'm doing ;p)

So I ended up on the long way round but got there in the end. Instructions are below but although this worked for me, I cannot guarantee it will for you & as the change came with an error, if you're not 100% confident & cannot lose the data, have another back-up.

1. Temporarily disable TM.

2.Double clicked the TM mounted drive and on the first folder seen (Backups.backupdb) I did Apple+I for Get Info.

3. Clicked the lock & entered admin password, then clicked on the + in the bottom left.

4. I added myself as "read & write" then from the wheel looking icon next to the + & - on the bottom, I selected this and chose "set myself as the owner" and ok.

5. It gave me a warning about not being able to change the settings once applied, clicked yes and it applied the changes.

6. Note - as my HDD is large, this change took AGES. I gave up after 45mins and let it go overnight.

7. From the top menu bar, choose "Enter Time Machine" and it all should be ok.

8. Turn TM back on.

Good luck peeps!

Jun 5, 2011 12:37 PM in response to Wiremonkey

Wow. Seems like this is a huge problem many people are facing with Snow Leopard. I got a new MBP yesterday. Transferred my work files using sharing folder from my iMac & faced this issue ! Some folders/files work ! Some have that red icon not allowing me to open. After cursing the OS & machine and trying many things finally found a solution.

As you all have experienced already the Get Info > Permissions doesn't works.

Same happened with me, though in my case - the main & only user - me wasn't even in this list with 'anyone' & 'staff' and a strange username called 'nobody' *** o.O ? So, this is what i did.

Go to the prime root folder/drive where you have those files & folders.

Now, do Get Info > Sharing & permissions > Click on '+' on bottom-left & add yourself as a user. And then, edit your rights to 'read & write'.

Now, click on Gear icon drop-down & do two things one by one.

First, Do - 'Make 'your account name' the owner.

Second, Do - 'Apply to enclosed item'

Somehow this worked for me..

Though this issue was much successful in making me highly frustated all day before >.< Hate when a overpriced ***** does this..

Jul 7, 2011 9:45 AM in response to instageek

Thank You Instageek!

I had a terrabyte internal drive go rogue on me in my 17" i7 MAcbook Pro. I am pretty sure it was when I tried to apply the command that gave me read and write permission to " all enclosed folders". (I would highly recomend NOT doing what Nerowolf says to do here unless you know it works on your OS and on your computer https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1778969?threadID=1778969 )

Bad idea as not only do hundreds of system files need to be read only to function, repairing disk permissions doesn;t fix the problem , and I had my TB internal become unopenable as well!!

Had I not had a recently cloned and bootable OS on hand I would have been royally buggered. Fortunately I did so I could at least access the OS by hiolding down alt when I restarted and choosing to boot up off the external clone which didn;t have the problems .

But that still left the problem of getting into my 1 TB iternal which has my sample library, large file back ups, and itunes/iphoto libraries etc... some of which weren't backed up yet.

This solution worked first time!! Many Thanks for your hardcore Ninja skills Instageek.

You've made my week as my LOgic install disks are a continent away and have 2 tunes to finish and deliver in the next 2 weeks.

You rock!

Darin ... www.FreQNasty.com

Jul 7, 2011 9:52 AM in response to Applefreq

Instageek solution is here

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2135793?threadID=2135793&tstart=0&start=0

"don't have permission to see its contents"