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Disk Utility cannot / will not repair permissions

Hi all,


I have installed OSX Lion on my Mac Mini Sever which was running OSX Snow Leopard.


All went fine apart from not being able to install the recovery HD as I have two RAID partitions in Mirror.


Everything seemed to be working fine, but upon loading Disk Utility and selecting my mirrored Raid if i select Verify / Repair permissions or verify disk nothing happens and no errors.


I can select each arid drive seperatly and verify disk, and i can connect an external usb drive and permission check.


So how can i check permissions on my default raid drives.??????


I have even installed LION on an seperate USB drive and booted into recovery and tried running disk utilities from there - same issue.


Can anyone tell me if their permission repairs work in Lion server.

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 21, 2011 4:20 AM

Reply
39 replies

May 28, 2012 9:10 AM in response to ktwalker69

Disk Utility has not found ANY permissions to repair for many months now through multiple updates. Mac OS X Lion 10.7.4 (11E53). I tried running permissions repair through terminal and it ran just fine and found nothing to repair.


By the way, I have no RAID drives... just 4 internal and 2 external. I have sent a bug report also.


My machine has started crashing on start up or starting up slowly.... which may or may not be related.


Just adding my 2 cents.

Jan 3, 2013 11:05 AM in response to Michael Rosengarten

I know this is old Michael, and who knows if you are still around, but your post gave me a good laugh 🙂 I'm not making fun or anything, but the way it's written makes it sound like you couldn't repair permissions on your wives. I absolutely know how that feels!!! Anyway, again, not making fun, just thanking the list for a hearty chuckle. 🙂

Oct 21, 2013 6:44 PM in response to l0l0

If the diskutility GUI does not repair permissions how can the command line do any better? Diskutil used the same repair packages.


So with 10.6.8 and RAID volume it does not seem possible to repair disk permissions. I have tried the GUI, command line and Cocktail - they all of course do the same thing, which does not work. What does work is if you go in and change permissions manually with chmod.

Apr 17, 2014 9:25 PM in response to ian kilby1

l0l0's post is helping me do my repairs on an external softRAID tower via Terminal.


"Repair Disk" didn't work in Disk Utility but I'm able to run things in Terminal.


I used this step:


diskutil list


then I did:


sudo diskutil repairDisk diskx (mine was at disk8)


then I did:


sudo diskutil repairVolume diskx (mine was at disk8)


These worked for me.


I tried Disk Utility again hoping I had jumpstarted it but it still doesn't work.

I wonder if Disk Utility is somehow not running with sufficient permissions...(the sudo makes you the boss of Terminal).


I'm going to explore some more.


Anyone trying to repairPermissions on an external or internal drive that doesn't have a bootable OS on it, it will be greyed out.

Reparing Permissions is only for boot drives.

Disk Utility cannot / will not repair permissions

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