help with HUGE privileges problem

[bozz2006]

Hey folks, wondering if i could get some help. My 2006 mac pro hosed me yesterday, and if i can't get this figured out, i'll reinstall from a time machine backup tonight, but here goes:

I downloaded toast 8 update yesterday (8.0.5 i think) and when in went to install it (dragging icon to applications) i was told that i didn't have sufficient privileges. so, after a while, i went to the apps folder and made sure I had read and write privileges by changing the permission. The update installed, and i tried to restart my machine, and it kept hanging at the gray apple screen.

So i popped in my leopard disk repaired permissions, then restarted. It worked fine and restarted. HOWEVER, I have 3 HDDs in my mac pro, one is a dedicated boot drive, another is a dedicated "home folder" drive, and one is time machine. When i restarted, i got a message that said my user account couldn't be found and the default leopard desktop showed up. I couldn't access any of my files on my home drive or time machine drive. I tried to grant myself permission, but the system wouldn't let me make any changes to these drives even though i am administrator and typed in my password. both time machine and home drives had a small silver padlock icon on the lower left corner.

Any advice on how to "unlock" these would be much appreciated. Like i said, if i can't figure it out, i'll just reinstall the OS from my time machine backup, and if that doesn't work, i also have superduper clones of both my home drive and my boot drive on an ext. HDD

 

[phuqit]

Fix that "padlocked" drive with the unchangeable Custom permissions

I had this problem show up twice in the last two years. Here's what worked for me both times:

Open terminal then type this command:

sudo chflags nouchg /Volumes/"drivename"

I put the name of the affected drive inside the quotes. Then entered the admin password (which you won't see) and rebooted. When it rebooted, the silver padlock on the left corner of the icon: GONE!!!!! I then went into the "get info" panel and changed all the permissions from Custom to whatever I wanted and it's COMPLETELY RESOLVED!!!!

 

[bozz2006]

Awesome. Glad you got it worked out. I couldn't figure it out, and just ended up doing a reinstall. Hopefully, there won't be a "next time", but if there is, i'll keep this in mind.