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one or more items can't be changed because they are in use

I am trying to copy over 1TB of data from a internal hard drive (in a hard drive dock) to a new internal hard drive when I attempt to copy the data I get the message in the topic title.

I was originally trying to do this transfer on Snow leopard and when this problem surfaced decided this was a good time to upgrade to lion and blow away the old system with all the rubbish and start a fresh but as you can tell I am still getting the same error even after formatting the hard drive before installing lion and not doing anything with the system except attempting to transfer the data.

I have copied larger amounts of data than this previously so have no idea what is going wrong.

Posted on May 1, 2012 5:12 AM

Top-ranking reply

henin

Level 1

13 points

Posted on Jul 19, 2012 10:41 AM

I was having trouble copying some files, getting the "One or more items in... can't be changed because they are in use" error. The files were grayed out in the Finder. Did a lot of Googling and found out about Extended file attributes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes) and xattr (http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/ man1/xattr.1.html). Upshot: If you ls a file in Terminal and the permissions list ends with "@", the file has extended attributes. If you ls the file again with the "-l@" flag, you will see the names and values of the extended attributes. In my case, it was the com.apple.FinderInfo attribute that was causing the problem. Deleted the attribute with "xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo [filename]" on each file and everything was hunky dory. NB: Extended attributes can also store resources or essential metadata, so don't delete them willy nilly. It's always safe to delete com.apple.FinderInfo.

Posting this to my top few hits so others won't have to spend as much time on this as I have.

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36 replies

May 1, 2012 4:42 PM in response to Linc Davis

ok what info would help to clear this up as I am at a total loss.

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,667 points

May 1, 2012 4:52 PM in response to macnewcomer22

What kind of data are you copying? Files in your home folder? Applications? System components?

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,667 points

May 1, 2012 5:08 PM in response to macnewcomer22

Quit any application in any user account that might have accessed the files. Try again.

May 1, 2012 5:13 PM in response to macnewcomer22

Next try a Restart and try again.

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,667 points

May 1, 2012 5:18 PM in response to macnewcomer22

Boot in safe mode (shift key down at startup.) Don't launch any applications; just do the copy.

May 1, 2012 5:52 PM in response to Linc Davis

Even in safe mode the error still persists.

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,667 points

May 1, 2012 6:00 PM in response to macnewcomer22

Back up all data, then launch Disk Utility, select the destination volume, and run Repair Disk (not Repair Permissions.) If any problems are found, repeat.

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,667 points

May 1, 2012 6:01 PM in response to Linc Davis

Preceding message was edited after posting.

May 1, 2012 7:43 PM in response to Linc Davis

I ran repair disk on the disk the data was being copied to and it came back with a message in green saying the disk was ok so I tried to copy the data again but the same error occured.