How do I delete a disk image?

Repairing the permissions of a home folder in Lion is a complicated procedure. I don’t know of a simpler one that always works.

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens.

Drag or copy – do not type – the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:

chmod -R -N ~

The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. When a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) appears below what you entered, it’s done. You may see a few error messages about an “invalid argument” while the command is running. You can ignore those. If you get an error message with the words “Permission denied,” enter this:

sudo !!

You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up.

Next, boot from your recovery partition by holding down the key combination command-R at startup. Release the keys when you see a gray screen with a spinning dial.

When the recovery desktop appears, select Utilities ▹ Terminal from the menu bar.

In the Terminal window, enter “resetpassword” (without the quotes) and press return. A Reset Password window opens.

Select your boot volume if not already selected.

Select your username from the menu labeled Select the user account if not already selected.

Under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click the Reset button.

Select  ▹ Restart from the menu bar.

Let's try to get a clearer description of the problem. You have some files on your Desktop. When you try to move any of them to the Trash, you're prompted for your password, and when you enter the password, it's apparently accepted, but nothing happens. The files don't go into the Trash. They also can't be moved around on the Desktop. Is that accurate?

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens.

Drag or copy – do not type – the following line into the Terminal window, then press return:

ls -AOel

Post any lines of output that appear below what you entered – the text, please, not a screenshot.

If any personal information appears in the output, edit before posting, but don’t remove the context.

You may have locked yourself out. Click on the disk image on your desktop (make sure it's not mounted). Then go to the File menu and go to Get Info. In the window that pops up, look at the very bottom at the "Sharing & Permissions". Make sure all items in there (your username, staff, everyone) says "Read & Write". If they don't hit the little lock and enter your username/password and click on each "Read Only" and change to Read & Write. Then hit the lock to lock it back up and try to delete it.

You locked the Desktop folder. Select it in the sidebar of a Finder window, open the Info dialog, and uncheck the box labeled Locked.

Not sure, but if it's mounted, try going back into Disk Utility and try managing it there?

Eject the image first, and you should then be able to delete the image file.

Yea, there's that. But I thought he meant that even when it wasn't mounted that it was asking for a password before he could delete the image. But I probably just read it wrong.

What exactly did you do?