Permissions problem with External Hard drive.

[nomhak]

Alright, so I've been using my external HD for almost a year now and its been pretty good, up until last night. I had a very odd issue with the entirety of my mac involving the permissions, basically no matter how much I changed the permissions to read and write for ANY file it would always revert to read only on my mac. With the external harddrive reading "custom" permissions. So I ran disk utility to repair the permissions and the history went on and on it seemed like it was repairing everything, but it didn't resolve anything. So I booted from the disk and clicked repair permissions and the disk from there. It completed so I restarted and was hit with a "kernal panic" or whatever basically that grey screen telling me to restart in 4 languages, restarted and same issue. So I booted back from the disk, and ran time machine, oddly enough I could access my backups from time machine on the disk and I went back 48 hours hoping that would resolve it. It did, I managed to get back on my machine with no issues what so ever.

Sadly however my backup drive is still reading the same issue and I can't back up to it anymore. The last thing I want to do is reformat it, I use time machine like a priest uses the bible and I'm going through older versions of my work all the time. Reformatting now will get rid of months and months of this. But at this point the backup is rendered useless.

Is there anyway to repair without a complete clean?

error message upon opening my backup


error message upon trying to backup


icon of backup drive


Can anyone shed some light?

TL;DR

My external harddrive won't let me unlock it to use it. Any way to fix this?

[BlueRevolution]

Try this:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=871557

It should sort out most common drive permissions problems.

[nomhak]

You sir are a genius. In laymans terms can you explain how this worked?

Original permissions:
total 16
drw-rw-r-T@ 14 nomhak  staff   544 Feb 18 00:54 Back-Up
drwxrwxrwx   1 nomhak  staff  4096 Mar  1 20:08 SONY
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root    admin     1 Mar  1 19:43 iMAC HD -> /

Back-Up: permission denied
SONY: writable
iMAC HD: writable
Back-Up: currently formatted as Journaled HFS +
Back-Up: permission repair attempted
Back-Up: works now!

New permissions:
total 16
drwxrwxr-x@ 14 nomhak  staff   544 Mar  1 20:08 Back-Up
drwxrwxrwx   1 nomhak  staff  4096 Mar  1 20:08 SONY
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root    admin     1 Mar  1 19:43 iMAC HD -> /

or why this happened in case I run into this issue?

[BlueRevolution]

I don't know why it happens, but we get people with that problem in here pretty frequently, which is why I wrote the script. It also does a whole bunch of troubleshooting behind the scenes, so using the script is faster than just giving you some Terminal commands to run, but in your case the command that fixed the problem would've been

sudo chmod 775 /Volumes/Back-Up

[nomhak]

Thanks a lot dude, forgive me for not searching. That probably would have resolved it, instead I hit macrumors, and apple support in which the initial support was, "you must unlock it first" and "Open disk utility and click REPAIR."

Thanks again.