Unable to chown a disk

I have many disk drives in an OWC Thunderbolt Flex 8. I had to take my Mac Studio into the "Genius Bar" and the reinstalled MacOS. This required setting up a now admin account on the boot disk. But now, some of the disks in the Flex 8 are owned by item 1. No other possible owners are listed in the info owner dropdown.

Even as root, I cannot run chown:

jamesarome@JARSTUDIO-2 ~ % cd /Volumes/MacHD3
jamesarome@JARSTUDIO-2 MacHD3 % ls -l
total 0
ls: .: Operation not permitted
jamesarome@JARSTUDIO-2 MacHD3 % pwd
/Volumes/MacHD3
jamesarome@JARSTUDIO-2 MacHD3 % sudo su
Password:
sh-3.2# ls -l
total 0
ls: .: Operation not permitted
sh-3.2# chown jamesarome:staff ./
chown: ./: Operation not permitted
sh-3.2#

I even copied the whole disk to another one, and when that was complete, the new disk exhibited the same issues. I cannot find any place to activate ignore ownership. The info pane for the disk exhibits a spinning dial trying to find the item 1 owner.

Help please!


Mac Studio, macOS 15.3

Posted on Feb 8, 2025 7:48 AM

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Posted on Feb 12, 2025 4:40 AM

Stupid question, but has to be asked. Have you granted Terminal Full Disk Access? System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access.


I find that the most common cause of the "operating not permitted" is lack of full disk access rights.

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Feb 12, 2025 4:40 AM in response to jrome

Stupid question, but has to be asked. Have you granted Terminal Full Disk Access? System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access.


I find that the most common cause of the "operating not permitted" is lack of full disk access rights.

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Feb 12, 2025 6:08 AM in response to jrome

Long shot, so apologies if it's no good.


You might have to go into recovery mode to set the permissions. Have a look at this recent thread. I don't think it's directly applicable to you but it is similar.


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255920086?sortBy=oldest_first&page=2


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Feb 8, 2025 8:44 AM in response to jrome

You are likely correct, however OWC may have the answer you are looking for! You also may want to post. your question on the forum for the version of Mac OS you are running. For example, if you are running Sequoia post on that forum. This forum is a Mac Studio forum, not everyone here may be as sophisticated as yourself on Unix knowledge.

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Feb 8, 2025 12:27 PM in response to jrome

so what is the problem? you appear to have all the access you need.

Here is what mine looks like:


ls -ale

total 0

drwxr-xr-x 14 root wheel 448 Feb 8 14:03 .

drwxr-xr-x 20 root wheel 640 Jul 17 2024 ..

drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 96 Feb 5 19:56 .timemachine

drwxrwxr-x 57 GrantH staff 2006 Feb 4 11:35 Install macOS Ventura

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1 Feb 8 14:02 M11-P31 -> /

drwxrwxr-x@ 9 GrantH staff 288 Feb 6 15:26 OCLP 2.2.0

drwxr-xr-x 21 root wheel 672 Feb 6 14:23 S240-13

drwxrwxr-x@ 20 root admin 640 Feb 6 13:33 S240-13 - Data

drwxr-xr-x 21 root wheel 672 Feb 5 13:08 SEA

drwxrwxr-x@ 26 root wheel 832 Feb 5 20:05 SEA - Data

drwxr-xr-x 32 root wheel 1156 May 9 2024 X13-Drv80

drwxr-xr-x@ 24 root admin 768 Aug 2 2022 X15-SSD120

drwxr-xr-x@ 27 root wheel 864 Jan 26 00:26 X15-SSD120 - Data

drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 96 Jan 28 17:37 com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots

GrantH@GrantsMacPro /volumes %


stuff is owned by root, wheel, and my Admin directly and it makes no difference at all.

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Feb 8, 2025 1:20 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

As I showed above, it is owned by item 1. And ls does not work, even as superuser.


jamesarome@JARSTUDIO-2 MacHD3 % ls -lae

total 0

ls: .: Operation not permitted


Even for subdirectories:

% pwd

/volumes/machd3/orcma

jamesarome@JARSTUDIO-2 orcma % ls -l

total 0

ls: .: Operation not permitted

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Unable to chown a disk

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