I was having some strange issues with my firewire disk in Final Cut Pro so I decided to repair the premissons using disk utility. For some reason "repair premissions" is grayed out. I did a repair disk and everything showed to be fine, but repair premissions is still grayed out.
Any idea what's going on? Or what I should do?
Thanks.
iMac 2.8, quad core i7, Mac OS X (10.6.4)
Repairing permissions only applies to bootable volumes. Although immensely popular, it's a waste of time unless you have a clear indication of a permission error involving system files, which you will probably never have.
If it is not permissions (everywhere on the internet "repair disk permissions" is always listed as one of the first things to do . . . and its always grayed out on the external drives in question) why can't I do a simple copy of files to an external hard drive? It won't let anything new happen, no folders, no new content at all.
What is the format of the drive?
Select the drive and cmd-I (Get Info). It will list the format of the drive. If it is NTFS, then you can't write to it without third-party software like Tuxera, NTFS-3G, or Paragon.
Repair Permissions only works on OSX or things installed by the OSX installer and, as LInc says, is rarely useful on recent versions of OSX anyway.
See About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature
The Repair Disk you ran checks the various directories, etc., on the disk
Two drives in question. First is a Seagate 4Tb formatted as MAC OS Extended (Journaled). I'm on a huge project, I've got about 30 other matching drives similarly formatted that all work, just this one won't accept new material. The second is a OWC 1Tb formatted by someone else as MAC OS Extended.
Both behave the same.
Select each drive in the Finder and Get Info. At the bottom of the window, in Sharing and Permissions, check the box to ignore ownership.
Also check at the top that the disk is not marked as Locked.
If you didn't change any of those settings, it may be that the drives are failing. Back up and try repairing the drives with Disk Utility.
I compared Information between a drive that works and the one that doesn't. All are identical. Read and write, locked indicator, ignore ownership etc.
In the Terminal, run this and show us the results:
ls -alOe /Volumes
Select the drive in the Finder and then press Command-I to get information on it. In the info window that shows up, click the lock at the lower-left to authenticate, and then check the box to ignore permissions on this drive. Do that for all external drives, and you should be able to avoid permissions problems when copying files to and from these drives.
Rick,
Did you ever solve this problem? I'm having the exact same issue. I have a Late 2011 MBP 17" with the i7 2.5. I have 16GB RAM installed and a Samsung 830 250GB SSD in the original HD spot with a 750GB Hybrid drive in the optibay. When a heavy load is being placed on the 750gb drive, it'll unmount and I will get the "didn't eject" error. I have to turn it off for about 5 minutes then boot it to have the drive recognized again. I especially notice this when I'm running VMWare Fusion along with my Mac and the Windows side is having to do some "hard" work.
Repair Permissions Grayed Out On External Drive
