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Switcher: Can't delete folder! "Do not have sufficient privileges"

Z

z400central

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 8, 2006
118
0
Trying to delete a folder on a portable HD and got this error:

"the operation cannot be completed because you do not have succifient privileges for x"

What gives?

I TRIED to install secret folder but it wouldn't launch.

Thanks!
 
File > Get Info > Ownership & Permissions > Change the You Can menu to "Read & Write"

I typically also go to details and make my user the owner.

Oh, and you might need the Administrator password. I don't recall if the prompt comes up, but I'm sure it might.
 
Ok I tried that and it says for "Ownership and permissions" and it says "you can only read"

Doesn't let me alter anything. I'm the only user on this computer and the admin.

Thanks!
 
You then need to go to Details, click the lock next to the owner menu, enter the admin password, and change the ownership to your username.
 
For some reason, I don't see a 'detail's section.

I have:

General
More Info
Name and Extension
Preview
Ownership and Permission
- You can only read
 
Is this a portable HD from a PC? Is it formatted in NTFS? You cannot write those files on that system - only read.
 
z400central said:
Yes it is from a PC...

How can I get it so I can write? I have a lot of info on there.
Click to expand...

You pretty much cannot.

Have a look at this article for some more detail on the issue.

I had the same problem. What I did was:

Backed up the drive;
Partitioned/reformatted it as half FAT32, half HFS+;
Copied everything back.

It is only used as an external drive when I boot into XP and for transferring files between the two operating systems. Works really well.

That article suggests you can convert from NTFS to HFS+ but I have never tried that.
 
I had this problem. I had a backup drive for my PC and I really wanted to use it on both my mac and PC, so I was looking for solutions for this on these forums. i never figured it out, so i just erased the entire drive and formatted it for HFS (the file system for my Mac). I'm actually really glad I did this because like two months afterward my Mac HD crashed and I didn't lose my files. But ya, I also couldn't figure out how to format it back to NTFS.

I'm sure there are solutions to split the HD between NTFS and HFS. Disk utility can't do it. iPartition might, but it costs like $50 or something. You may need to partition it on a PC and i have no idea how to do that.
 
A deeply dumb idea to post on a thread that was last written to 4 years ago, since the info on that has been superseded. You can now read and write to NTFS partitions. Google NTFS-3G, Macfuse and ntfsmounter
 
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