My Non-System Volumes are locked, I can't access my volumes anymore!

[patte]

I'm in big trouble and currently operating with a semi-functional system out of my second admin account…

Previous History: I'm on a MacPro and I have my main user account on another volume than my system. This has worked just beautifully for me over the past years, sometimes there are drawbacks and it's kind of more failure-prone in some cases. This 'some cases' now happened again: there was a blackout and after that I couldn't login to my user account on the non-system volume anymore. I've been there once and hadn't any problems fixing it somehow, but now I screwed up big time.

I tried…
- repairing permissions and resetting the ACL
- started Snow Leopard 911 and rebuild my two main volumes

This didn't lead to anything, but after a long night I simply tried to rename the user account to "Patte-old" in System Preferences » Accounts Ctrl-Click "Patte" [my main user account]. I also set to path to "patte-old".
The next thing was to create a new user which I named after the old one: "patte" and this time specified the home directory on "/Users/patte". This is a symlink to the real location on the other disk "/Volumes/Lagerhalle/patte".

It worked instantly, but of course the permissions were messed up… I tried repairing them and I guess this is where I messed things up…
All I remember is that I booted again into Snow Leopard 911 from my external USB drive and used the "Reset Password" » reset ACL there instead the one on my Snow Leopard Boot Disc Image. I repaired permissions and checked the folders with DiscWarrior again… So, to make a long story short:

The important part: my problem (skip everything above if you lazy/don't need details)

Currently I'm stuck with this…

I can unlock the little lock in the bottom right of the "Get Info" dialog, but I can't make changes to my harddrives anymore. They instantly revert to "custom". I've also tried BatchMod and a little bit of terminal magic (which I'm not too familiar with) to reset the permissions, but… I wasn't allowed to chage them, even not via "sudo chmod". Maybe I did something wrong there, because this ought to work from my understanding on….

Please help me out on this one, I'm capable of firing up all the maintenance tools and typing in all sorts of commands (that you give me) into terminal. The thing is, I guess I'll have to to a clean install to get rid of some other errors, but even then I would have no access to all my data on the other drives. Thanks for reading through!

 

[patte]

Solution

After chasing the wron tral all the Time, I've find the solution on the (old) apple discussion board: http://cl.ly/2NFn

Actually there are 2 solutions: 1 easy and fast, the other a bit more complex

 

[Dark Goob]

After chasing the wron tral all the Time, I've find the solution on the (old) apple discussion board: http://cl.ly/2NFn

Actually there are 2 solutions: 1 easy and fast, the other a bit more complex

So future searchers coming upon this thread won't have to sift through that horrific Apple Discussion thread, here is the answer:

___QUESTION:____
HOW DO I UNLOCK A FILE IN OS X THAT WON'T UNLOCK?
HOW DO I UNLOCK A FOLDER IN OS X THAT WON'T UNLOCK?
HOW DO I UNLOCK A VOLUME OR HARD DISK DRIVE IN OS X THAT WON'T UNLOCK?
I TRIED UNLOCKING IT WITH GET INFO IN FINDER AND IT WON'T WORK, HOW CAN I UNLOCK IT?
sudo chown GIVES ME THE ERROR, "OPERATION NOT PERMITTED", WHEN I TRY TO ALTER THE PERMISSIONS, HOW DO I FIX THIS?
sudo chmod GIVES ME THE ERROR, "OPERATION NOT PERMITTED", WHEN I TRY TO CHANGE THE OWNER AND GROUP, HOW DO I FIX THIS?

___ANSWER:_____
YOUR FILE HAS BEEN LOCKED BY ANOTHER USER WHO IS NOT YOU. FIRST YOU MUST UNLOCK THE FILE USING THE FOLLOWING METHOD, THEN YOU CAN USE sudo chown AND sudo chmod WITHOUT ANY ERRORS!
TO UNLOCK ANY FILE IN OS X, OPEN TERMINAL.APP AND TYPE:

sudo SetFile -a l /Volumes/MyHardDrive/MyFolder/MyFile

(that's a lower-case " l " there after the " -a ")
TO UNLOCK A STUBBORN FOLDER IN OS X, OPEN TERMINAL.APP AND TYPE:

sudo SetFile -a l /Volume/MyHardDrive/MyFolder

TO UNLOCK A STUBBORN VOLUME / HARD DISK IN OS X, OPEN TERMINAL.APP AND TYPE:

sudo SetFile -a l /Volume/MyHardDrive

Sorry for the all caps look, but I want to drive home a point, which is that in most of the forums I come across, people do not give simple, step-by-step question-and-answer responses to common issues. Instead people respond by quoting an unclearly-worded initial question, and usually their response does not actually answer the question directly or concretely. The result is that future people who type the question into google do not directly find the answer to their question, since it's generally in a different post than the initial question (and sometimes, in a different thread). I'd rather leave a post with the question and answer both clearly stated in terms that a search engine would have found easily as a match to my initial question, along with providing the simplest and most direct answer to that question right below it! FTW!

-=DG=-

 

[patte]

So future searchers coming upon this thread won't have to sift through that horrific Apple Discussion thread, here is the answer:

Thanks Dark Goob,
I was gonna post
that too here,
I just tested it
a few days ago
since I was on
vacation. And
it works.