How do I turn off "authentication" on my mac?

Of what? Do you mean the general process of having to enter your admin password? That is something you should not do.

You now have two user accounts on your computer? One set up when the computer came out of the box and the second transferred using Migration Assistant? They have different user names. The files you must authenticate are the ones that you migrated. Is that correct?

OK. The simple solution: Log out of the account you are now using. Log into the account you migrated. Delete the other account.

What was your account on your other computer before you migrated from your Mac Pro? From the list you provided I see:

Gordon Atkinson - admin user.

Kyla - admin user.

tests - standard user.

Guest - we can forget about this one.

Gordon Atkinson, you say, is the current user. I don't see any other user account for you that might have been migrated, so I'm assuming this is your original account on the Mac Pro.

You need to tell me which of your accounts is the one you are trying to use files on that require you to authenticate. Now under normal circumstances you should not be able to access any other user on the computer. Doing so would require you to know the passwords for the other users.

Maybe you can give me some background on how you transferred data from the Mac Pro to the MBA.

BTW, is the user account information you provided for the Mac Pro or the MB Air? I need to know for the MBA, not the MP. 🙂

"BTW" means By The Way. 🙂

OK. So, let's begin getting some things clear in my head.

You now are using your new MBA. You transferred your files from an older MBP that you gave to Kyla. You then erased the MBP you gave to Kyla and transferred her account to the MBP. Kyla's account had been backed up to the new Time Capsule using Time Machine. You used Time Machine to migrate Kyla's account to the MBP.

You then migrated your account from the Time Machine backup to your new MBA. Subsequently, you've started having these permissions problems in your account. However, I assume there are no problems with Kyla's account.

So, do I have a correct idea of the situation? If I do then I think that the problem stems from either how the Time Machine backups were made or how they were migrated. I believe you can set your computer right as follows:

Boot into single-user mode and at the prompt enter these commands pressing RETURN after each:

mount -uw /

chown root:admin /

chmod 1775 /

reboot

After rebooting open Terminal in the Utilities folder. Paste these commands into the Terminal application to avoid typos:

sudo su

Press RETURN. Enter your admin password when prompted. It will not be echoed to the screen. Press RETURN again. Now paste each of the following at the prompt and press RETURN after each.

chown root:admin /Applications

chmod 0775 /Applications

chown root:admin /Library

chmod 1775 /Library

chown root:admin /System

chmod 0775 /System

chown root:admin /Users

chmod 0775 /Users

chmod -R -N /Applications

chown -R :admin /Applications/*

I suggest you first print these instructions out using a large mono-spaced font so you can read them correctly. There are spaces in the lines that may not be easily observed.

Now, do the following:

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions - Lion/Mountain Lion

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported then click on the Repair Permissions button.

Select Terminal from the Utilities menu. Enter resetpassword at the prompt and press RETURN. Follow instructions in the dialog window that will appear, but do not reset your password. At the bottom of the dialog window will be an option to restore permissions in the Home folder to default. Click on that option.

Select Restart from the Apple menu.

Back up all data.

This procedure will unlock all your user files (not system files) and reset their ownership and access-control lists to the default. If you've set special values for those attributes on any of your files, they will be reverted. In that case, either stop here, or be prepared to recreate the settings if necessary. If none of this is meaningful to you, you don't need to worry about it.

Step 1

If you have more than one user account, and the one in question is not an administrator account, then temporarily promote it to administrator status in the Users & Groups preference pane. You can demote it back to standard status when this step has been completed.

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 icon grid.

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

sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:20 ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ 2> /dev/null

Be sure to select the whole line by triple-clicking anywhere in it. 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. You don't need to post the warning. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command.

The command will take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear, then quit Terminal.

Step 2

Boot into Recovery 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 OS X Utilities screen appears, select Utilities ▹ Terminal from the menu bar. A text window opens.

In the Terminal window, type this:

resetpassword

That's one word with no spaces. Then press return. A Reset Password window opens. You’re not going to reset a password.

Select your boot volume ("Macintosh HD," unless you gave it a different name) 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.