Cannot repair permisions on external hard drive

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Level 1

1 points

Cannot repair permisions on external hard drive

I have a WD 2TB FireWire 800 hard drives (X3), and all are formated Mac OS Extended (Journaled). When I restarted my computer, I noticed my TM gave me an error message that the drive I selected for TM was locked. After further investigation, I could see that all my WD externals had listed Cutom for Privileges. Since I am an Administrator, I unlocked each vloume with my password, and attempted to change the Privileges back to Read + Write, but they kept changining back to Custom. One of the volumes is unchecked Ignore ownership on this volume, but all three volumes are acting the same. Is there any way I can recover my data and repair my privilges on all three volums? In Disk Repair, repair permisions is grayed out. I have not used the Terminal enough, but with the right assistance I will give it a shot.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Sep 20, 2011 2:15 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 20, 2011 2:50 AM in response to bones1169

bones1169 wrote:

…In Disk Repair, repair permisions is grayed out…

That will be the case if there is no OS installed on each external drive. That's perfectly normal and expected behavior.

Click on the icon of each drive in question to select it in the Finder and do a Get Info (Command + I) to bring up the Info dialog box. You should be able to see and change the permissions at the bottom of that dialog box.

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Answer 2

bones1169 Author

Level 1

1 points

Sep 20, 2011 2:56 AM in response to Ramón G Castañeda

Thanks for the quick reply. I can see the Privileges at the bottom of the Get Info Window for each of the drives, but when I change it to Read + Write, it changes back by itself to Custom.

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