Major Permissions Issues With My Upgrade; All Resets Failing
Hi all -
Around two weeks ago I decided to upgrade to Lion. I had been running the most updated version of Snow Leopard. I decided, because my old install was very crufty, to do a clean install.
I backed up my machine using Time Machine, separately backed up my critical files (Document directory, Music folder, etc) to a separate external hard drive, wiped the disk, and performed a clean install of Lion. I then pulled my folders back out of the TM backup individually so I only restored what I needed. I did not pull back my ~/Library folder - just the content.
Since then, I have been suffering from permissions issues. At first, they were mild - if I wanted to move stuff around in my home folder, for some reason it was asking me to enter in my admin password, for example. But now they are unbearable.
Every time I quit Safari it reopens with extensions gone, old sessions (from last week!) restoring. Mail reverts all of my preferences every time I close it, and now I can't change them back: if I try to turn off Junk Mail filtering, it says it can't write to the Preferences folder as such: http://i.imgur.com/hT4hp.png. I can't open some applications.
The first thing I tried was [Directory]->Get Info-> set myself as the owner to everything and active it for all enclosed folders. That didn't do anything. Neither did "Repair Permissions" in Disk Utility.
Finally, I decrypted my entire disk, booted from the recovery partition, and ran the "Reset Password" app, which is supposed to reset all permissions and ACLs. It threw the following messages/errors:
-bash-3.2# /Applications/Utilities/Reset\ Password.app/Contents/MacOS/Reset\ Password
2011-08-05 14:45:04.983 Reset Password[355:9503] Could not check in to check for terminal pokes.2011-08-05 14:45:24.142 Reset Password[355:9503] Repair Home Directory permissions started2011-08-05 14:49:08.441 Reset Password[355:9503] Some user permissions have been reset2011-08-05 14:49:08.441 Reset Password[355:9503] Repair Home Directory permissions complete2011-08-05 14:49:08.443 Reset Password[355:9503] Repair Home Directory permissions error: Permissions reset on user home directory failed.Restart and all of the same permissions problems are still plaguing me.
Anyone have any idea what is going on? Googling around it seems like permissions issues in Lion are well-documented. I've tried all of the fixes I can find. Luckily, I still have my old SL TM backup lying around in a folder, so at the very worst I can wipe my machine and clean install SL and pull that stuff back to there, and I'll only lose a few documents. I had thought of clean installing Lion again and using the Migration Assistant to pull stuff over, but a) I don't know why that would make a difference and b) if Reset Password can't fix the ACLs and permissions I doubt Migration Assistant can.
Help, anyone?
Black Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.2), 2.2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM.
