Unable to change permissions on Hard Disk Drives after rolling back OSX Lion to Snow Leopard
Are you able to help me?
I had several problems with permissions and a series of other serious issues after upgrading to Lion, so I did a clean re-install of Snow Leopard 6.4 (from disk), upgraded to 6.8 and still had permissions problems which I have made worse by doing what I thought made sense - giving my administration user access to all hard disks and time machine back-ups. I emphasise "hard disks" because I have an iMac 27" i7 and 250GB Flash Drive provided by Apple where I keep OSX and aplication files. Thus the Flash Drive (FD) becomes the boot disk, not the Hard Drive.
Changing preferences on the Apple HD (not FD) and the Time Machine Backup HD to my user name (with administration privaleges) has had the reverse effect of not giving me access to anything other than my OSX system volume on my 250GB Flash drive! I can only see my files on the hard drives with the root user (which I have used for the first time ever to get that access). But using the root user does NOT allow me to change permissions of either my Time Machine backup disk or the Hard drive on my iMac ! Why oh why??
Googling for solutions suggested using iRepair to change permissions but that gives me a "boing" when I try with no effect - at least a "boing" is more feedback that the Apple Finder's response to my attempt to alter permissions in the "info" window!
Oh! and of course I have unsuccessfuly tried the Disk Utility as well, which does come back with errors - that appear to be "safe to ignore" from Apple Support's website!
I originally posted a slightly different message to this one to https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3241822?answerId=16955471022#16955471022 because it appeared to have similar issues. It appears as if my problem is unfortunately quite unique!
Godfrey Bridger
Hamilton, New Zealand
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), i7 16GB Mem, 2TB HD, 250GB FlashD