Finder requires password for moving or deleting files every time.

I have been through nightmares with permission problems and all I can suggest ist to go ahead with "Clean Install".

My problems started with Safari freezing after an update and the "genius" staff at "Genius Bar" performed all magic they knew and suggested there being a problem within my "user profile". They suggested me creating a new User and "they" transferred all my files to the new user and deleted the old one. The nighmare got worse because the transferred files had something attached to their tail from 1st user and would not let the 2nd "new" user deal with them. Next advice by Genius Bar was upgrade to Lion as my OS was Snow Leopard. I did this too and nothing changed and all Permission Repairs did no change. I had problems backing-up iPhone, I was unable to deal freely with iPhoto, iCal, etc, etc.

The story is simply too long and I can only suggest, do a clean install and forget the rest.

I did this yesterday and my only worry is; "if I use my back-up from Time Machine, will I again face the same permission problems since the back-ups were from a user now deleted and non-existant?"

There is a slight possibility that the trouble will continue if you use your timemachine back-up.

The files on there belong to the account of which the back-up was made.

I'm not 100% sure though, it's just a wild thought.

DarMah,

Yes it will!

I had a freshly bought MacBook Pro and it all started when I installed from the Time Machine...

The only suggestion I have is to copy and paste one folder, and see if it has any problem. Back then I was so happy with the function of migrating the whole previows computer that I didn't do it "one by one", or by hand each file...

Do try it and let me know, please, I'm considering re-installing the whole system and I'm wondering if that would happen.

The Genius who helped you was nothing of the sort. If you find yourself back in that same Apple Store looking for assistance, and the same Genius tries to help you... RUN! Suggesting that you install a major OS update to fix this is about as dumb as a mechanic wanting to rebuild your car's engine to fix a sticky sunroof.

You've posted this on the tail end of an old, long topic... that's never a good idea. In the future, start your own. However, what you need to do is probably to reset your user folder permissions. Since you are now using Lion, hold down command-R at startup. When the Mac OS X Utilities window appears, choose Terminal from the Utilities menu. Type "resetpassword" (without the quotes) and hit return. Do not change the password in the window that appears... click the Reset button under "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs".

Thomas A Reed wrote:

The Genius who helped you was nothing of the sort. If you find yourself back in that same Apple Store looking for assistance, and the same Genius tries to help you... RUN!

A "Genius" is just a vendor which sold sufficiently well to get a new cap.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 22 janvier 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.2

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

My iDisk is : http://public.me.com/koenigyvan

Your guess is right and the problem persist when files are restored from back-up.

I just tried this with Mail restore. It does restore all mail in the Mail Folder in the new User Library of the new Mac OSX Lion, however, it does not make any changes to the preferences saying no permission.

I will now try what "Thomas A Reed" has suggested, namely to "reset password" and see if this works with the Mail restore. If not, I don't know further.

Dear Cbuzio,

I did in fact copy only the "Mail Folder" from my back-up (Time Machine) and the permission problem has been revived. I also backed up the important files like the Mail Folder on USB flash, and will try to restore from there to see if this works.

Dear Thomas,

I have not yet tried your suggestion but the way it goes, I will do exactly as you said the next time I switch on the MacBook, and I sure hope it helps.

If not, I will have no other alternative but to create mail accounts again and download mals again but the mails I kept on last Mail and deleted in Gmal & Yahoo are lost for ever. I will post my unique experiences!!

I will now try what "Thomas A Reed" has suggested, namely to "reset password" and see if this works

I did NOT recommend resetting your password! That will not fix the problem. Please be sure you follow the instructions I posted very carefully.

I downloaded BatChmod free and easily after a google search. It worked well and unlocked my files! I no longer have a pencil with a line / slash through it on the bottom left of my finder window for these folders! Yay!

Easily enough, Find the file/folder you're having trouble with, set your Owner to "R, W, X" and then check "Change ownership...", "Unlock", "Clear ACLs" and "apply to enclosed folders". You're done!

I recently upgraded my computer and all my music/video/photo files were kept in an external hard drive "Meda" folder. The folder became locked out when I ported all the backup files on my Time Machine into a OS-Journaled hard drive. I'm not sure if they were initially locked because they were from a Time Machine backup or because I switched computers and lost the permissions somewhere. Since I moved my Time Machine profile over, too, I should've technically still had permissions.

Hello! this appears on mine! Its different on the trash section! Please help! It keeps asking me for the password when I try to put something in the trash and then it deletes it automatically!

drwxr-xr-x 26 501 staff 884 Jan 21 13:33 .

drwxr-xr-x 6 root admin 204 Jan 14 13:41 ..

-rw------- 1 RafaelAvilaS staff 3 Jan 2 2011 .CFUserTextEncoding

-rw-r--r--@ 1 RafaelAvilaS staff 24580 Feb 13 16:05 .DS_Store

drwx------ 10 501 admin 340 Feb 15 00:06 .Trash

drwxr-xr-x 4 RafaelAvilaS staff 136 Mar 17 2011 .adobe

-rw------- 1 RafaelAvilaS staff 3747 Feb 15 00:11 .bash_history

drwxr-xr-x 3 RafaelAvilaS staff 102 Nov 9 23:09 .config

drwx------ 3 RafaelAvilaS staff 102 Oct 22 18:07 .cups

drwx------ 14 RafaelAvilaS staff 476 Feb 14 23:55 .dropbox

drwxr-xr-x 17 RafaelAvilaS staff 578 Sep 27 01:00 .fontconfig

drwxr-xr-x 3 RafaelAvilaS staff 102 Sep 27 00:58 .mplayer

drwxr-xr-x 27 RafaelAvilaS staff 918 May 25 2011 .pseint

drwxr-xr-x 2 RafaelAvilaS staff 68 Mar 17 2011 Applications

drwx------ 15 RafaelAvilaS staff 510 Feb 14 14:59 Desktop

drwx------ 57 RafaelAvilaS staff 1938 Feb 14 23:24 Documents

drwx------ 348 RafaelAvilaS staff 11832 Feb 15 00:10 Downloads

drwx------@ 16 RafaelAvilaS staff 544 Feb 14 15:16 Dropbox

drwx------@ 50 RafaelAvilaS staff 1700 Feb 13 16:13 Library

drwxr-xr-x 4 RafaelAvilaS staff 136 Jan 5 2011 LimeWire

drwx------ 5 RafaelAvilaS staff 170 May 9 2011 Movies

drwx------ 8 RafaelAvilaS staff 272 Feb 24 2011 Music

drwx------ 171 RafaelAvilaS staff 5814 Feb 12 23:32 Pictures

drwxr-xr-x 6 RafaelAvilaS staff 204 Jun 30 2011 Public

drwxr-xr-x 5 RafaelAvilaS staff 170 Jan 2 2011 Sites

-rw-r--r-- 1 RafaelAvilaS staff 303805 Nov 16 20:45 save4e0e.tmp

Thanks for your help!

When I received the late release of Onyx, I applied it.

Here are the permissions applying to items of my Home folder:

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 15 février 2012

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 12 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.3

My Box account is : http://www.box.com/s/00qnssoyeq2xvc22ra4k

Follow the directions I posted above for reseting your user folder permissions.

RadRod,

Thanks for the sudo "chmod -RN ~" command! -N removed the OSX specific ACL's from the files in my home directory but left the UNIX permissions intact... I can copy, move, and delete files properly now... -N is a nonstandard flag for the unix chmod command, so I didn't even know to check for it.. (sigh)

To everyone afraid to try it.. Don't be... Just make sure you're logged into terminal as the user who's having the issue. You can tell because when you are in the terminal, if you look at the prompt, the user your currently logged into the terminal as will be the item just before the '$'.

Jessicas-Awesome-iMac:~ jessica$

If you're logged in under someone elses name, or you "sudo su - ", the prompt will not contain your username, like this:

Jessicas-Awesome-iMac:~ root#

That being said, I ran the command as root (because I'm a tard) and it caused no ill effects. The root user's home directory is NOT the same as the root directorty of your primary disk so I got a bit lucky there... I don't recommend you attempt it as well though.. ;-)

Ricardo

Message was edited by: Meleschi

I'd also like to report that this thread was very helpul and fixed my problem. I'm on a brand new iMac 2011 running Lion. I had an external NTFS formatted drive that contained a bunch of files I wanted to move to my new Mac. So, I plugged the baby into the iMac and copied them to a folder under "Macintosh HD".

I created an account for my wife (non-admin) and when logged in as her copied some of her personal files from that new folder to her personal User/Documents and User/Music. This completely boned up the permissions because she was unable to edit any of the files and when trying to move or delete it would ask for an Admin password.

After reading this (and several other) threads I opened Terminal on her account and first did a recursive chmod to make sure the file permissions were set. I was also seeing the phantom second "everyone Custom" permission in Get Info.

from Documents and then Music I ran: chmod -R 755 *

then I ran: chmod -R -N *

I then did an ls -le and the ACLs were gone. She is now able to edit, move, delete the files in her User folders.

I still do have an issue where Macintosh HD itself only shows "system: Read & Write", "wheel: Read only" and "everyone: Read only" as permissions. There is no Admin or my user name. So, each time I want to create a folder directly under Mac HD I have to enter my password. That's for a different thread and I understand there are other posts on this topic.

Thanks all!