Finder keeps asking my for my password every time i want to move or delete files, How do i remove this?

What about creating a new user account with admin rights to see if everything works as it should. If it does, move your files to that account and dump the original.

hmoore45 wrote:

It's getting annoying to authenticate every time I want to move a file to another folder.

This is done only when moving files between users, not within the same user folder.

If this is occuring you need to rest your user permissions

Step #5 here

Step by Step to fix your Mac

Bingo!! Step 5 in the link was the key. Thanks ds store! So far, its working with just setting the permissions on Get Info for the Mac HD. Did not actually "reset" the permissions. Somehow, I was "read only" under the HD.

I just stumbled onto this page and saw one of my many many many problems (of how to move files without having to authenicate)......I have Lion 10.7.2 and have MORE problems than I could have ever dreamed of - as if I had bought a $300 laptop that came with a free demon. A few problems: the Mac HD icon will not stay put on the desktop where I want to be - whether I reboot or not...one day it stays put - the next day it moves all by its self over to the other side/ after I rename a folder and create an alias - sometimes the folder will rename its self back to the original name/ when I create a folder inside of another folder sometimes I have to authenicate but at other times I dont/ when I move a folder onto the desktop from somewhere else, it will stay put 1/3 of the time, move to the right corner 1/3 of the time or move to the far left corner 1/3 of the time/ if I want to move a file or folder into another folder, sometimes it will only make a copy but then sometimes it will move without making a copy (some of my recording sessions are 5-6G's).......these are but a "few" of the totally unacceptable problems that have plagued me from day 1 with this Mac. Does anyone understand why this is so? Is it just mine?

thank you so much! i have read so many posts and yours is the only one that's effective! 🙂

Just highlight your hard drive

get info

click lock

click plus

pick admin

click your user name

chose read write

close lock

worked for me

For some reason when i enter my username terminal tells me "illegal username" ive gone into system preferences to make sure of y username and its exactly what I'm entering.

so its: sudo chown (space)(my username which also has one space)(space).trash

what should i do?

I am having same issue, but after I enter the sudo command it asks for pw but wont let me type it in? By the way my user name is my first and last name, so it looked something like this:

sudo chown Steve Smith .Trash

Is that correct?

Thank you CF461. The "apply to enclosed items" step was omitted from so many of the other online answers and instructions. This solved the problem for me as well.

Phew.

Just highlight your hard drive

get info

click lock

click plus

pick admin

click your user name

chose read write

close lock

worked for me

Worked for me. i was unable to rename any folders without signing in, which was extremely annoying. This solved that.

I got a certified pre owned mbpro 13" mid 2012 a few months ago that came with this problem. I contacted apple within a few hours of delivery explaining my dilemma and asking for startup media, either dvd or flash drive to do a clean install. I got transferred to sales, put on hold, and disconnected. I tried this over again several times. I am a hurricane sandy evacuee and I have been using a plastic cell phone that has finally stopped working. I can't call Apple any more. The reason I got this mbpro machine was to be able to communicate. I saved two macs when I was evacuated, but after keeping them in my car bouncing around for a month and a half in the winter weather before I was able to safely unload them somewhere, I lost about two thirds of my hard drives. I went out and bought a hair dryer to be able to do the hair dryer trick, and it did work, but I lost so many drives that only one of my machines survived, and it was not the one with wifi. I apologize for the OT info, but I want to explain why calling apple is no longer an option for me.I am staying in different temporary situations until my house situation is sorted out. I have done PRAM and SMC and repairing permissions in all the ways described and I can not finally repair the permissions beyond about 80% of the drive. Something is preventing that. When I do sudo chown, My password is not recognized. I believe that the previous user was a programmer whose apps pop up for sale on my screen on the app store every once in a while. I believe that users' super user id is still controlling permissions, and I want to use fresh, factory version os 10.8.2 media to reinstall the system. The hard drive icon is greyed out when I do a get info, to try and modify permission. What can I try to do to encourage apple to send my the system softare on any kind of media? From reading these logs from users, I know some users have purchased the system software on media. I contacted apple asap when I got this unit in the mail, I saw the permissions problem immediately. Ever since I have been authenticating constantly to do every basic operation and I am getting tired of if. I have tried making a new admin account and the problem is the same. I have reset the permissions on my home folder about 10 times between yesterday and today and they look correct but don't control the hard drive. Any thoughts? I've tried everything I could find in these support threads.

as an update,

I was never able to delete com.apple.alf.plist

because my preferences folder was invisible. My folders went from preferences panes to printers with no preferences in between. This is the way my machine came from apple. When I searched with spotlight for that file, no file was returned.

I used the recovery partition and reinstalled 10.8.2

After I reinstalled the system using recovery, I went right to that area to try to see it. At first preferences was where I expected it to be after the reinstall, then it moved to another location out of alphabetical order, then it disappeared altogether again, and later I was able to see it in its expected location.

After deleting that file and restarting I now have two files:

file://localhost/Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist

file://localhost/Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist~orig

I tried to change permissions again on the hard drive icon and on the home folder, and it seems like I have been able to do that for now.

Does this behavior suggest a problem I can correct? Does the alf.plist tilde orig need to be there?

Can anyone tell me what is going on?

I am far from expert, does this suggest an EFI problem?

Message was edited by: k155

Thanks iVmichael. Worked perfectly! Still not sure why this happened.

I have the same issue,

sudo chown your_user_name .Trash

Did not work for me,

also the right click host HD drive select name and make sure "Read & Write" is selected (which it is as default)

so this did not work either.

it only happened when I added a passwod to my user account, where as before I had no password set so it never asked for one moving files etc.

For anyone trying the chown command who has a space in their user name, enclose the user name in single quotes. e.g:

sudo chown 'david m' .Trash