Can't mount drive after changing permissions to 777

[Vandal.]

Hey guys,

I'm having trouble mounting an external hard drive after I changed it's permissions to 777. With "get info" on the disk itself I changed the permissions of me, staff, everyone to read & write access for the whole disk incl. "apply to enclosed items". Now I can't mount it, disk utility tells me it needs repairing, but repair permission and repair disk both fail. It gave me read access at one point but obvioulsy I couldn't change the permissions from there.

It's a 2TB disk in a JBOD enclosure if that makes any difference and was serving as SMB media server for my home network via USB on my router (Linksys E4200).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
V

 

[r0k]

Hey guys,

I'm having trouble mounting an external hard drive after I changed it's permissions to 777. With "get info" on the disk itself I changed the permissions of me, staff, everyone to read & write access for the whole disk incl. "apply to enclosed items". Now I can't mount it, disk utility tells me it needs repairing, but repair permission and repair disk both fail. It gave me read access at one point but obvioulsy I couldn't change the permissions from there.

It's a 2TB disk in a JBOD enclosure if that makes any difference and was serving as SMB media server for my home network via USB on my router (Linksys E4200).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
V

I'm confused. It was attached to a Linksys router. That means it was probably EXT4 format or FAT32. Applying chmod 777 on a FAT32 disk probably does nothing. Applying it on a Linux formatted disk is something I've never even speculated about.

Can you give a little more information?

Where was the disk when you did the permission change? Did you do it over the network or did you move the disk to your Mac and do it? Why did you do the permission change? Was there a problem you were trying to solve? How is the drive formatted? FAT32? NTFS? EXT3 or 4? HFS+ (Apple)? Was the disk ever used to boot a machine? If so, what machine was able to boot from it (windows, linux, Mac)?

 

[Vandal.]

Sorry for the missing details, I freaked out quite a bit when it happened so I rushed the post.

The drive is part of a four disk JBOD which holds my media files to stream to Plex, one hard drive is intended to serve as Time Machine backup disk. The file system for all four drives is HFS+ (newer Linksys Firmware now supports it to some extent) and they were mounted via Samba. I got a few error messages about insufficient permissions esp. with this Time Machine Samba workaround so I connected the drives to my Macbook via USB and changed permissions of three of them with "get info" in Finder.

Might be a little too detailed, but here's the setup and what I changed:

First disk 1TB 2 partitions:
ALPHA - no permissions changed
TIME MACHINE - no permissions changed
Second disk 1.5TB 1 partition:
BETA - permissions of main folder changed to 777
Third disk 2TB 1 partition:
GAMMA - permissions of main folder changed to 777
Fourth disk 2TB 1 partition:
DELTA - permissions of whole disk changed to 777

I can fully access the first three disks when plugged in via USB, DELTA, the disk in question was accessible as read-only when I first connected it, but not anymore. On the router all drives do show up as SMB shares, but BETA and GAMMA come up with no files and 0 byte capacity, DELTA is not accessible but shows up. Also the drives I fiddled with weirdly now show up as BETA2, GAMMA2, DELTA2 in Samba.

I'm really lost here to be honest, only solution I see is to backup my files and reformat the drives, but I don't really have 5.5TB of disk space to do so...


edit: correction, I would only need 2TB for a backup

 

[r0k]

Can you take a look at the permissions on Alpha since you didn't break anything on that drive? I bet they are 755.

Since it would appear Delta is almost a goner anyway, perhaps it would be worth trying to set the permissions to something more reasonable, perhaps 755. I would try this on / (NOT its contents) and on one folder (and its contents) below / on that drive and see if things start working again. If that helped matters, I'd consider changing the entire drive to 755. I believe 755 (where owner can write and group and world can read) is the default and should work fine for a USB drive or a NAS drive. Thank God you didn't try this on your OSX boot drive!

If you manage to bring Delta back I would consider making Gamma and Beta 755, again starting with / (NOT its contents) and one or 2 folders and their contents below /.

Hope this helps...

 

[Vandal.]

I managed to get Beta and Gamma back setting 755 to / on both, nothing below, thanks a lot for that tip, they both show up in Samba just fine now.

When I connected the drives after a reboot for some odd reason Delta came back up as read-only so by splitting it's contents I could fit a backup on the other drives. Setting permissions didn't work as it was read-only so I re-formatted it and am just copying the original files back.

Thanks again for your help!

 

[Vandal.]

So after formatting and copying the files back to Delta was acting up again, Disk Utility gave me an "invalid index key" error and couldn't repair the disk. I managed to fix it with DiskWarrior, which found a bunch of "incorrect items and values" that it had to repair.

It now mounts fine and can be accessed via Samba.

I might sound a little paranoid, but after reading up on it a little, could this problem be hardware related after all? Delta is the latest drive I got about two months ago and hasn't been used for anything else yet.