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Permissions not being reset in LION

Help I need to reset the permissions on my 10.7.3 lion software. Apple support has escalated this to software engineering levels and have not been able to give me a resolution. For some unknown reason all of a sudden my permissions would not allow me to properly move files to the hard drive. Also it would not allow me to take and move files around with the hard drive, it would just perform copies and not moving files to these locations - these were unexpected actions that were happening within the system.

I have worked with Apple support and have reset the ACL's using a root user this has still not resolved the problem.

Apple keeps escalating this issue up to higher levels of software engineering department however it takes 2 to 3 days every time to reply to me and this is unnerving.

Can someone help me with mastering this whole permissions issue at the user level and unlock everything so that my computer can just go back to normal?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on May 5, 2012 8:28 AM

31 replies

Jul 1, 2012 7:35 PM in response to BillyRayValentine

Hello BillyRay,

I noticed having the same problem as you: I couldn't edit my Macintosh HD folder, which is really something annoying if you started using Mac OS many many years ago.

I found a solution, since the helpful advices by jsd2 didn't work for me (although I'm sure they fixed some of the permissions).

First of all you have to enable root user:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4499?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

then head to your computer icon, highlight your HD icon, cmd-I and now in the privileges section there should be your administrator account. Change from read-only to read-write. Now I can move any file and folder which are in the root level.

Obviously having the root user on can be risky, so take your precautions.

Permissions not being reset in LION