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AmbientChaos

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 11, 2014
44
0
So I'm about to copy files off a system partition, and I'm afraid I'll have problems with permissions.

A bit of background - OS X won't boot (looping progress bar) and recovery Disk Utility says it can't repair it. Files are viewable in MacDrive on the Boot Camp partition (which I'm using, so I don't think the disk has failed, just something wrong with that particular partition).

My plan is to remove the drive and mount it on another Mac and see what I can copy.

Thing is I've recall having bad experiences with doing things like this in the past - I'm afraid there will be permission issues somewhere down the road when I try to use these copied files.

Ideally I'd like to copy the files, and apply them with "default" permissions from my working Mac, as if those files had been created the working Mac, and not the failed Mac.

I don't want to access my files and not be able to/having to authenticate because they "belong" to another user (i.e. the account on my old Mac).

tl;dr is there a way to copy another user account's (mine) files from a system drive, without running into permissions problems down the road? Maybe stripping the files of all user account-related permissions?
 
Last edited:
You will be fine. It is the users folders that contain those permissions you are concerned about. The files themselves are read/write everybody normally.

So just copy over whatever files you need to your account and you should be good.
 
You're right! I had to authenticate when moving top-level folders inside the user folders, yet not their contents. Though I did use the same username as before, so that may or may not have helped.
 
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