Can't change permissions

cbhme828 wrote:
I've been trying to change permissions on a certain file on an external hard drive. I've tried following the instructions on other parts of the forum, but when I open the Info menu for the file, there isn't anything under the Sharing & Permissions heading that I can edit.

what do you mean by that? there should be something there. if it's grayed out unlock the lock at the bottom with your admin password and you'll be able to change permissions.

Any help would be really appreciated.

first, repair the external drive with disk utility. repair disk, not permissions. try after that.
if that doesn't help run the following terminal command

ls -ladeO@ /path/to/problem/file

and post the results please.
to get path to the file just drag it to the terminal window. make sure all the spaces in the command are as given.

I figured out the problem for me anyway. The USB drive was formerly connected to a PC and because we used it to transfer files during the switch to the Mac the file format was fat32. So I moved the contents to the internal drive reformatted the USB drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and I now have the ability to change the permissions. It must be a limitation of Fat32. I would suggest checking what format your external drive is in. I would be willing to bet that's the problem.

I have a very similar problem with no solutions yet. I have a bad Vista drive that will mount to desktop on my MAC in a USB external enclosure but is no longer a reliable boot drive. My Win7 (bootcamp) partition wont even read the drive. Fortunately Snow Leopard will and I can see the files that I need. However, I can't copy files. When I used the "Get Info" window to change permissions, there is _no tiny yellow lock icon_ to click on in order to correct the issue. "Sharing and Permissions" seems to be permanently at "You can only read". Is there some other way around this?

As a follow up, I also checked the "Get Info" window on my working Win7 harddrive (which I created through bootcamp and is a _separate drive_ from the Mac OSx drive in my MacPro). It too has the same "Sharing and Permissions" statement, "You can only read" and it doesn't have the tiny lock icon in order to change the permissions.

Is there something about Win7 and Vista that makes it harder to manipulate files? There really needs to be a way around this. There's no way I can boot the old os off the Vista drive now and I need my files off that drive so that I can add them to the Win7 drive.

I am having the same problem. It works on the external firewire drive but not on the usb drive. Is it possible that it has something to do with being connected via USB?