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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

Jul 21, 2011 2:46 PM in response to billSwartz

Glad someone else has the problem - but sorry you have it.


Everything else seems fine!


Wierd thing is i installed Lion on my MBP and i had loads of permissions to fix straight from a complete format and install.


Did a complete install as the upgrade worked but lion was as slow as a dog !!


Let me know if you cure it otherwise i may have to format the server and start again ;(

Jul 21, 2011 11:57 PM in response to dslknight

OK did some more investigating last night and heres where i got.


I created a new Administrator user and tried Disk Utility - Same issue


I tried Diskutil from command line and it worked FINE !!


I tried Disk Utility again after command line - Fail - same issue


Lastly I used time machine and pulled the SL version of disk utility - this started to repair permissions.


Therefore I can only assume it is an issue with Disk Utility checking Raid drives.


Today I will try another version of Lion Disk Utility and see if the one on my server is corrupted in any way.

Jul 22, 2011 6:39 PM in response to ian kilby1

I'll start by saying, I can't rest until I figure things out - when it comes to the Mac.


I usually run a 4 drive RAID array on my Mac Pro (first Xeon default config, quad 2.66 Xeon) just for sheer speed, all 1GB drives. Never a problem with Disk Utility with Snow Leopard all the way back to the pre-release of Mac OS X, what some ten years ago?


The Disk Utility app can create and erase RAID arrays (I've tested all of them I think - mirror, concatenated and my favorite STRIPE) just fine. However, the app will only blink (as above described) when Repair Permissions or Repair Disk is attempted.


The terminal command works fine for repairing permissions:

sudo diskutil repairpermissions /


The terminal command (at least I think this is it!!) for repairing the disk:

sudo diskutil repairdisk /


however returns this:

You cannot specify an AppleRAID set and it should not have a partition map


I'm suspicioius this is new. Can anyone check to see if Disk Utility within a Snow Leopard install, via the terminal as shown above, returns the same results? I think it probably doesn't. I think it just goes on to repair.


Not sure.


I called Apple and they haven't been able to help yet.


It was 108 degrees here in NYC at about 3:30pm, my apartment has terrible power - I lost my Mac several times today. I always AppleJack or at least use Disk Utility to verify the drives if I lose power. No good with Lion. DiskWarrior 4.3 **does** work.


If I find anything else out for sure from Apple, I'll post here. If you can offer any ideas, please shoot!


thanks

Jul 25, 2011 4:38 AM in response to Jakimo

Hi,

Same problems here... however I discovered that I couldn't use 'disk repair' and 'repair permissions' following the ongoing problems getting time machine to work with my Drobo-FS. Drobo support have been scratching their heads after I updated the Firmware and Dashboard software etc etc. But everytime I try and access the Drobo Sytems Preferences crashes so badly that I have to restart holding down the power key.

In all everything is working fine on my Macbook air. I think there are serious unresolved problems at Apple with Raid mirror array sets and Lion.... They need to get right on this as many of us are power users and this problem is stopping us from getting work done today... thinking of reinstalling SL and waiting for a future fix.

Jul 25, 2011 7:24 AM in response to Jakimo

It does works but with a different verb (from diskutil manpage), you should type the command like this:


sudo diskutil verifyVolume /


Jakimo wrote:


[snip]


The terminal command (at least I think this is it!!) for repairing the disk:


sudo diskutil repairdisk /


however returns this:

You cannot specify an AppleRAID set and it should not have a partition map


I'm suspicioius this is new. Can anyone check to see if Disk Utility within a Snow Leopard install, via the terminal as shown above, returns the same results? I think it probably doesn't. I think it just goes on to repair.


Not sure.


I called Apple and they haven't been able to help yet.


It was 108 degrees here in NYC at about 3:30pm, my apartment has terrible power - I lost my Mac several times today. I always AppleJack or at least use Disk Utility to verify the drives if I lose power. No good with Lion. DiskWarrior 4.3 **does** work.


If I find anything else out for sure from Apple, I'll post here. If you can offer any ideas, please shoot!


thanks

Jul 26, 2011 6:00 PM in response to l0l0

I heard back from Apple directly this yesterday, Monday July 25.


The engineers have tested this for themselves and it's confirmed: the Disk Utility app does NOT handle verify/fix permissions/disk of a RAID volume.


They are aware of it and will possibly address this in a future update. (umm, that's their wording)


Meanwhile, the functionality is very easy to do via terminal. If you can't figure out how to, let me know..


thanks

Jul 28, 2011 5:19 AM in response to Jakimo

As stated in the previous posts you can type the following in a terminal:


- to verify permissions:


diskutil verifyPermissions /


- to repair permissions:


sudo diskutil repairPermissions /


- to check disk:


diskutil verifyVolume


- to repair disk, first boot from another volume (external drive, USB stick, DVD, … ), then display a list of all your mounted volumes in a terminal type:


diskutil list


- search for the identifier of the disk you want to repair in this list (could be disk1 but depends on how many disk you have attached to the server) and type:


sudo diskutil repairVolume disk_your_number_here
//e.g. disk1


- to learn all other options available with diskutil:


man diskutil


Hope this helps

Jul 28, 2011 9:02 AM in response to l0l0

An easy way to select the boot volume for disk repair using sudo diskutil repairVolume, is to just drag and drop the volume from the Finder to Terminal.


After booting from another copy of Lion (SL's DU will not work), launch Terminal and type 'sudo diskutil repairVolume ' (you'll need a space at the end there), then drag the boot volume from the Finder to the command line. It will populate, hit enter. Viola!

Jul 30, 2011 3:57 PM in response to ian kilby1

After fix permissions on my primary disk, Disk Utility detect same file permission errors again. I think permission list is wrong or corrupt.


I run this:


$ sudo diskutil repairPermissions /


Started verify/repair permissions on disk0s2 HD1

Permissions differ on "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/Rem ote Desktop Message.app/Contents/Resources/pl.lproj/UIAgent.nib"; should be -rw-r--r-- ; they are drw-r--r--

...


But UIAgent.nib file apparently have correct permissions (-rw-r--r--). See:



$ sudo ls -l /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/Rem ote\ Desktop\ Message.app/Contents/Resources/pl.lproj/UIAgent.nib


-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 20773 Sep 27 2007 keyedobjects.nib

Disk Utility cannot / will not repair permissions

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