The operation can't be completed because you don't have the necessary permission

[free.flyer]

I had a Mac Book Pro 2010 which had two users, myself (john) and my daughter (Soph).

This Mac was fiited with a 2TB SSD, but the Mac is no longer working so I removed the SSD and bought a new Mac Book Pro M1.

When I plug the SSD from my old Mac into the new Mac, I can access my user (john) but I can't access my daughters user (Soph).

As expected I get the error that I don't have permission to see its contents.

I know the credentials for user 'Soph', but I did not create a user for my daughter on the new laptop.

So how can I access this folder ?

Do I have to create a new user (Soph) on my new Mac in order to access the folders ?

Or is there some other way to do this ?

I am suprised I can access my own folder 'john', as the username and password on my new Mac is different to my old Mac.

It's not clear to me how the users and folder access works in this particular situation

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

Something you could try. READ MY ENTIRE POST FIRST.

1. Connect the [old] SSD to the new MacBook Pro.

2. Let the icon for the drive appear on the desktop. DO NOT "open it".

3. Click on the SSD icon ONE time to select it, then bring up the "get info" box for the drive (you can type command-i).

4. At the bottom of get info, click the lock and enter YOUR administrative password.

5. Put a checkmark into "ignore ownership on this volume".

6. Close get info.

NOW try accessing the files you couldn't "get to" before.

WHY you need to do this:
Doing what we just did above removes all the permissions issues.
You can now copy just about anything over to the new MBP, and what you copy will "come under" your ownership.

Hmmm....
possible problem...
Remember that "what used to be your daughter's" stuff will now come under YOUR ownership if you do this.

Is this what you really want?
Will your daughter now have an account on this MBP, too?

I'm going to GUESS that you didn't use migration assistant to set up the new MBP?

If you want this stuff to belong to HER, there's another way.

 

[f54da]

Great question.

See https://eclecticlight.co/2024/07/29...ferent-things-in-macs-how-to-tell-them-apart/
and

How is file owner and group remembered for an external drive?

I formatted an external hard drive with an ext4 partition and subsequently mounted it. So that I could use the new partition, I did: sudo chown me:me /mount/directory to change the file owner and g...

unix.stackexchange.com

OSX like other unix-y systems tracks file ownership by UID, and by convention UID for each login account is assigned in same order (501 onward)


I'm actually surprised that osx doesn't have the default behavior of ignoring ownership for removable medium, someone who is not familiar with behavior of unix permissions might get very confused by this