Lion Permissions Problem

I am having the exact same issues. I tried repairing permissins as well as resetting the ACLs from the snow leopard installer, all to no avail - many apps will not allow me to change preferences and everything reverts upon restart - even files that have been deleted return to their previous spots. Please Help!

It does seem to be a permissions issue.

I'm currently trying to recreate my user accounts with the root user, but I can't seem to edit the root password, even from the reset password utility. From the utility is says that I do not have sufficient privileges to do that. I think I may need to boot to a mounted known good operating system (probably Snow Leopard) in order to actually make the needed changes. I'm also going to try a reinstall...

Here's hopin'!

Yup just laboriously reinstalled because was having the dissapearing finder window issue & now I have "custom access" on everything, even if it says Read I (Me) have "Read & Write" and desipite Applying folder level "Read & Write" to enclosed items & using Disk Utlitiy to fix file premissions globally. SO now every file move or deletion needs to be validated. How on earth was this not picked up in beta? Would love to keep Lion but it's looking increasingly like a reinstall to Snow Leopard as having to validate basic file actions is really not going to be acceptable. Just as well I didn't install Lion on any of my other Macs....

Similar issues... can't restore "Library" folder from Time Machine backup and after a reboot for instance dock settings are back to default.

I am having the exact same problem, and tried all solutions discussed here, to no avail. However, in my case the admin account does work, the other accounts don't. I am going to try to recreate the other accounts and see what I can get, but I am really irritated with Lion. The only feature it has that I like is the mission control, every other change has been for the worse.

Same issue, many other bugs with Lion that are annoying me as well but this one is by far the worse of them.

Late 2008 MBP

deciided to restore all except the Library folder... so far, so good (been 5 days now)

I may have some good news but I need some brave souls to test it out. I have run these commands and haven't had a single problem since!

The first command removes all ACLs from files in the home directory:

chmod -R -N ~

This command puts the necessary ACLs back where they belong:

chmod +a "everyone deny delete" ~/ ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Library ~/Movies ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Public

That's it. My problems disappeared. If this doesn't work or you are afraid of Terminal, I also ran across this in all my searching: http://www.fixkb.com/2011/08/reset-home-folder-permissions.html

Let me know if this works for you as well and if so, spread the good word!

Brave? i've tried everything else to no avail. THANK YOU! Finally my mac is acting normal again. the first command returned an invalid argument message, but after the 2nd one everything started to work again. Praise you! 🙂

This sounds similar to the problem I'm having.... http://discussions.apple.com/thread/3209638

Will try cgDesign's solution at somepoint and report back.

This is excellent, it worked for me! Unfortunately I had already created a new account to repair the problem, but at least I know how to solve it of anotehr account has this problem.

Thanks a lot!

tripm wrote:

the first command returned an invalid argument message

For future reference, if you ever get an error message while using commands in a Terminal session that you got from another source, you should stop immediately, report the problem, and ask for further help. Using someone else's commands then ignoring an error message is an easy way to destroy your system.

That is dangerous. Don´t try it.

😠

stianbrathen, what do you mean it's dangerous? It secures the permissions on your home folder. If anything, it's recommended.

William, I completely agree. And that is precisly why I enlisted "brave" users only to do some testing with me. While I am quite comfortable and familiar with the shell, things can always go wrong. From what I know, if a command encounters an Invalid Argument, it will halt the command before it begins since it's conditions were not met.

From the response I've gotten here and on other boards, it sounds like the ACLs are not the issue, it's strictly permissions. I recommend skipping the first command, run the second. For clarification, this sets your home folder to read/write privilages for your user only and sets everyone else to read only.

cgDesign wrote:

From what I know, if a command encounters an Invalid Argument, it will halt the command before it begins since it's conditions were not met.

That's true, but not the point I was trying to make. If you're running a sequence of commands, a command may depend on the state left by the previous command. Continuing to execute commands after one encounters an error can cause unpredictable results. In the original example, the first command removes ACLs. The second command adds them back. If the first command doesn't complete successfully, the result after the second command may be an unintended set of ACLs. If an earlier command is supposed to set a position in the file hierarchy but fails, a subsequent command may delete files that it wasn't supposed to.