No Permissions

[Doc69]

I have a lot of external drives attached to my my new MacBook Pro. Lately I’m asked for my password when I want to change some files. I see that the Permissions on Macintosh HD are “System Read & Write”, “Wheel Read Only” and “Everyone Read Only”. If I try to add myself it says I have no permission.

When I check check “Ignore ownership on this volume” on the external drives, “System Read & Write” changes to "My Name Read & Write” and “Wheel Read Only” changes to “Staff Read Only”.

Any ideas what's going on and how to fix this?

 

[ThrowerGB]

I have a similarly confusing mess. About the time I started using Mac Studio 2022 with the M1 Max chip, and set it up from TM backing up a 2017 27" iMac. I started seeing quite a few files with changed permission as Doc69 describes.
I also started seeing some files with permissions belonging to different versions of BOINC and with cross linked permissions. i.e. BOINC1 giving permissions to BOINC2 and BOINC2 giving permissions to BOINC1. Some years ago I was running SETI@Home using BOINC but thought I'd gotten rid of it. I've had to go through all of my files to see if I could find and correct all the files with changed permissions and correct them. I've not finished that yet because I don't understand what happened to cause the problem Doc69 talks about above, and I don't want to mess things up completely. I'm still contemplating a complete reinstall, but that still leaves me with questions about my data files with strange permissions.

 

[svenmany]

I can only add one piece to the puzzle. One of my external drive's volumes has owners disabled. When I look at files on that drive, the owner is whoever is logged in. I checked this in terminal with two different user accounts.

ls -ln "somefile" showed owner id 501. Then I logged in as a test user and it showed owner id 503. So I guess there really is no owner attribute on the file itself, but it's derived by the OS based on who is logged in.