firewire problems in Tiger
 

I have a Two FW drives, one La Cie and the other Maxtor, (the LaCie drive actually uses a WD HD), I'm having intermittent problems sinc e upgrading to tiger.
La Cie offrer a Firmware update and I installed that on the drive in question but Maxtor ofgfer no firmware updates other than for the 'one touch' FW drives.
Problem is that disc utility sees the drives, although they appear only as page icons, and sees them as mounted, offers an option to dismount them yet neither drive appears on the desktop.
Also I cannot properly set disc ppermissions etc on either drive, when I try to change the owner I get ewrror code 213.
Anyone offer any advice?

Just to add to this, when I switch to root the FW drive mounts as normal. Make a new user I hear you say, this is the second time in a week I'm looking at making a new user and I'm wondering if I can't clean up this account instead of doing it all over again.
Interseting aside to this is fast user switching. Once I enabled this my scanner appeared 'missing' in the new user acc, when I switch back to the acc where the scanner software was installed it's now having a flaky time seeing the scanner and I have to restart.
Is there a problem somewhere in fast uswer switching? Is this what's screwing up my accounts?

1) Try avoiding fast-user switching while testing for a while to see if that is indeed related to the problem. I.e. logout before logging in as a new user

2) Look to see what the state of the checkbox "Ignore ownership on this volume" is (via File/Get Info on the disk icon)

3) Check if you are affected by the bug that I mention in this other thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showpo...95&postcount=3

4) Make sure that the filesystems on those disks (and your internal disk) are in good shape by doing "Repair Disk" in Disk Utility. To do the internal disk, you will need to reboot from the Install CD.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

5) After all of the above, try a permission repair:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751

Please explain exactly what you are doing when you try to set these permissions. Tell us in detail - on the level of "I click on the ..."

Had a look at your bug report and ran the workaround, I also ran applejack to do a deep clean of permissions etc restarted, and the drive mounts in root, my account and my sons account ( which is managed ).
Happy days, I then tried to manage acces to the FW drive, file info, attempt to change the owners name to select priveliges, error code 213, unexpected error, but it will allow me to change the name, I set access limits, close file info, open in my sons account and therte's no change at all to acces tro the FW drive, close my sons account, open my admin account and the drive has vanished again but disc utility still sees it as mounted albeit with the page icon again instead of a disc icon.
I'm not using fast usefr switching now but having tried to set disc priveliges had again disabled my scanner connection.
Peter

So it seems you are trying to set some limit on access to this drive from your son's account.
You still aren't giving sufficient detail about exactly what you are doing.

For the moment, don't worry about your son's account and don't try to set access limits for his account, etc.
Just pretend his account doesn't exist for the moment.
Now let's try to get the drive back to normal for your account.

And I repeat - please tell us in full detail exactly what you are doing.
(It evidently isn't something that is a usual thing to do.)

I think what I'm trying to do is actually dead simple, done it many times before in limiting student accounts. Just as an extra, just restarted from the disc, ran disc repair on startup disc and each of four FW drives in the FW chain, repaired permissions etc on the startup disc, restarted and lo and behold the 'flaky' fw drive mounts perfectly but now a different FW drive, actually the first one in the chain, refuses to mount on the DT , same behaviour as the original problem drive, disc utility sees it as mounted, will allow me to repair it but says no repairs are necessary and I'm back to square one but with another FW drive!!! yet the other three in the chain are behaving normally And I haven't tried to set any permissiopns etc for this drive, haven't fiddled with it in any way and it's never done this before. This is killing me and I haven't worked for nearly two days trying to sort this out.
OS 10 was supposed to be trouble free compared to 9 but I have as many priveliges and permissions headaches as I used to have extension conflicts and they were infinitely easier to troubleshoot.
What I was trying to do and it isn't any more complicated than this is the following.
File info/ Ownership and permissions/ Details ( unlock )/ Owner's name try to change ( get error code 213 unexpected error ) but actually goes on to allow me to select my sons account ) change Access to no access/ close file info. That's it nothing special but the changes don't take effect.
Ineterestingly, trying the same routine now after the drive successfully mounted (still talking about the original problem drive ) I'm getting the foillowing.
File info/ Ownership and permissions/ Details ( unlock )/attempt to select Owner for my son's account and I get the finder asking me to authenticate my password. I would have expected this but as soon as I authenticate and select my sons account to set limits I get the unexpected error 213 again.
I don't know what else you need by way of ddetail, it isn't any more detailed than that.
Thank you for your time, I need to get to the bottom of this and get back to work.
Peter

More of the same, created a completely new admin acc, logged in and now two FW drives exhibit this behaviour, won't appear on DT but Disc utility says they're mounted yet root allows both drives to mount normally, can't work like this. I'm stuffed if a new account won't let me see these drives.

Ifr your still follolwing this, what I'\ve been able to do is swap the drives in and out of various enclpsures and the problem persists so it's not the drives or the enclosures and root still sees them and mounts them norma`llyt, it's something weird happening with accounts other than root.
So I logged in as root, did file info on the suspect drives, clicked ignore ownership on this volume. Logged bacxk in as Dad admin, the drive mounts normnally but has several folders with the red MINUS sign disallowing access, I have to manually reactivarte access to them. God it's a real pain, but what on earth is corrupting this in user accounts, even brand new ones?

Hayne, thanks for your time so far, what do you make of it as it's unravelling, I'm baffled.

Well I'm very confused about what exactly the situation is- mainly because you've been describing so many different things and (as I said before) you seem to be trying to do something unusual (yet I'm not quite sure what that is).

If you want help with this you need to slow down, and solve one issue at a time. As I said before, ignore your son's account for the moment.
And tell us in more precise detail about your hardware. Earlier you spoke of two firewire drives, but now you are talking about 4 of them?

Again, let's try to simplify and concentrate on one issue at a time. So pick one (and only one) of the firewire drives and physically disconnect all of the others (and all other non-Apple peripherals). Now what is the situation with that one drive? Does it mount okay with your regular user? (And it would be easier if you supplied names for these various user accounts so we could be keep things straight.)

Glad To hear from you and thanks again for taking the time, I'm covering a lot of angles because I need to get up and running again, this is my workhorse.
Yes I have four FW drives but not to confuse the issue the problem remains basically the same, something weird has been happening to the drives and it seems to be prompted when i try to change permissions. The changing permissions routine is dead straightforward and has been in the past and is exactly as I described earlier. I'm not doing anything unusual. Changing the 'owner' in File Info in order to select another user and set priveliges is normal but in this case is prompting the 'unexpected error 213' dialogue pop-up as soon as I click the pane to reveal the list of users and select another user, but it doesn't stop me selecting another user and setting priveliges bhut they don't take effect at all and the drive then does the disappearing act I have described in detail earlier.
As for accounts there's root which I have enabled at login, Dad and son, no other accounts. I did make a new account for myself to test things but have dumped it.
Peter

I repeat - please disconnect all but one of them and get that one working first before even thinking about the others.

It is unusual to be attempting to change the ownership on an entire drive.
Again, please slow down and proceed step by step.
Don't try to change the permissions or ownership on anything.
Just connect one drive (and only one) and see if it is working.

The next step is to tell us why you think you need to change the ownership or permissions on that drive. I.e. what are you trying to achieve?

Ok have one FW drive mounted. And I definitely don't understand you now, you say it's unusual to try to change permissions on an entire drive? Never heard that before, that's surely the point of having permissions and privileges.
Maybe I've misunderstood the whole permissions thing.
Simple fact is my FW drives are off limits to my son because they are my working drives with all my projects so when he logs in I don't want him to have access to them and fiddle around. OK now , is it not possible to use permissions on the drive to restrict his access, I thought that waas the point of permissions and accounts etc?

Okay, so now look if the "ignore ownership on this volume" checkbox in the dialog you get from File/Get Info on that FW drive's icon is checked or not.
You want it unchecked (blank).

What does it say for the ownership & permissions of the top-level folder on that drive (as seen in the Get Info dialog you just looked at)?

Another way of asking the same question is to tell us the results of the following command in a Terminal window:
ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_drive

Ownership and permissions are not for the full drive - they are for each file/folder at a time. The Get Info dialog allows you to apply changes to enclosed items - but unfortunately this doesn't always work (I'm unsure of what causes it to fail).

Note also that if you create new items afterwards, the ownership & permissions will not be affected by what you set in Get Info - they will instead be determined by the current user's settings.

OK it's un checked

When I type that command in Terminal I get 'command not found"

Well that's a surprise, I have in the past been able to set such permissions on an entire drive in college where I look after app 20 G5s, I HAVE done this before and locked an entire drive from acces by setting permissions in the File info dialogue.

I',m genuinely surprised that you find this unusual.
My top level folder in the drive in question is my applications folder. So file info for that folder at the moment reads as follows

Ownership and permissions------ Read only

Details
Owner---Unknown
Access---Read and write
Group----staff
Access-----Read only
Others----Read only


Well it's 1 am on Monday morning here in Belfast and I'm off to bed. Thanks again all the way from Montreal, hope you can shed a little more light on this.
Peter

You were supposed to supply the actual name of the drive in place of "name_of_drive"
Please try it again and show us (via copy & paste) what command you typed as well as the results of that command.

Actually there is always a top level folder that contains all of the other folders. If you like, the top level folder is the drive itself - that's the way Finder makes it appear.

So that indicates that the owner of this folder is a (numerical) user id that is not one of the users currently set up in the Accounts preferences. I guess you created this folder on some other machine or with some previous incarnation of users.

You can try changing the owner to your regular user account using the Get Info dialog, being sure to press the button to apply this to enclosed items.
Let us know what happens.
If that doesn't work, we can help you do it with a command in Terminal.

I did that, with name of drive and still got 'command not found'
"Last login: Mon Dec 5 12:46:05 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
host86-141-212-160:~ dad$ Is -Id /Volumes/Video-Storage
-bash: Is: command not found
host86-141-212-160:~ dad$


'Top level folder is the drive itself', yes I understand that but you've said I cant restrict access to that folder as it represents the entire drive.



Yep changed owner to my account 'Dad'
gave myself read and write access
selected 'son' in Group
for access gave him 'no access'
Others 'read only'
clicked 'apply to enclosed items'
got a dialogue box asking me to authenticate, did so
Got a dialogue box telling me operation could not be completed because I don't have sufficient priveliges etc.

The command is "ls -ld /Volumes/Video-Storage"
I.e. "ell ess minus ell dee" (lowercase L, not uppercase I - in two places)
You can just copy & paste it from above.

Sorry, you are misinterpreting what I said above. You can restrict access to that folder, but doing so will only restrict access to that one folder. To restrict access to the sub-folders of that folder, you need to do the "apply to enclosed items".

That should work as long as your son's account really does belong to the group you specified and no other groups (the usual situation). But it is rather unusual to deny access to one particular group but allow it ("read only") for all others. E.g. a guest account would have access.

I don't know why this would happen, assuming that the name & password you supplied were those of an administrator account.

Please open a Terminal window and copy & paste the following commands, press Return, then copy & paste the results back here so we can see:

id
ls -l /Volumes
ls -ld /Volumes/Video-Storage
df -h
echo -----------------

Last login: Mon Dec 5 13:06:28 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
host86-141-212-160:~ dad$ id
uid=502(dad) gid=502(dad) groups=502(dad), 81(appserveradm), 79(appserverusr), 80(admin)
host86-141-212-160:~ dad$ ls -l /Volumes
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 18 dad staff 646 Dec 2 17:59 Current
drwx---r-x 43 dad dad 1496 Dec 2 13:43 DVD build
drwx---rwx 52 dad dad 1802 Dec 3 15:42 La Cie Back-up
drwxrwxr-t 76 dad dad 2618 Dec 2 13:43 LaCie
drwxrwxr-t 48 dad dad 1666 Dec 2 13:43 Video projects
drwx---rwx 83 dad PV 2856 Dec 2 18:55 Video-Storage
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Dec 5 12:45 XXX -> /
host86-141-212-160:~ dad$ ls -ld /Volumes/Video-Storage
drwx---rwx 83 dad PV 2856 Dec 2 18:55 /Volumes/Video-Storage
host86-141-212-160:~ dad$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s10 57G 42G 15G 74% /
devfs 120K 120K 0B 100% /dev
fdesc 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
<volfs> 512K 512K 0B 100% /.vol
/dev/disk1s10 234G 66G 167G 28% /Volumes/Current
automount -nsl [230] 0B 0B 0B 100% /Network
automount -fstab [234] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/Servers
automount -static [234] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/static
/dev/disk2 75G 37G 37G 50% /Volumes/La Cie Back-up
/dev/disk4s6 149G 100G 49G 67% /Volumes/LaCie
/dev/disk5s2 114G 39G 76G 34% /Volumes/Video-Storage
/dev/disk3s9 58G 28G 30G 48% /Volumes/Video projects
/dev/disk3s10 58G 6.3G 51G 11% /Volumes/DVD build
host86-141-212-160:~ dad$ echo

OK Hayne ( hope that's not your surname in which case I'm being bad mannered )
Above is the result and it's dutch to me, hope it tells you something.
Peter

Assuming I'm interpreting this correctly, the above shows that:
- your internal disk has two partitions: "XXX" and "Current"
- you have 4 external drives currently mounted and one of those external drives has two partitions ("Video projects" and "DVD build")

I noted earlier that it would be best to unmount and physically disconnect all but one of your external drives while you are getting that one drive fixed up the way you want it. You evidently have not followed that advice. It would make things simpler if you did.

The info about that one drive we were concentrating on above is given by this line:
drwx---rwx 83 dad PV 2856 Dec 2 18:55 Video-Storage
which indicates that the folder at the top of that drive is owned by "dad" and that the group ownership is "PV" (a group to which the "dad" account doesn't belong - does the "son" account belong to that group?) and that the permissions on that one folder are such that all operations are allowed for owner ("dad"), no operations are allowed for users in the group "PV", but (strangely) all operations are allowed for all other user accounts.

(See this Unix FAQ for info on permissions.)

Previously you were trying to remove all permissions for the "son" account but permit everything for all other accounts. As I remarked above, this is a rather strange thing to do.
So let me assume that instead you want all the files and folders on that volume to be owned by "dad" and to have group-ownership of "dad" (the group "dad") and that you want to have full access (all operations) for the account "dad" but no access at all for any other account.

You could accomplish that by the following commands (to be run in Terminal):

sudo chown -R dad:dad /Volumes/Video-Storage
sudo chmod -R o-rwx /Volumes/Video-Storage

You will be asked for your password (the one of the "dad" account) when you run these commands. You may also get a small warning-lecture if this is the first time you have used the 'sudo' command.

Penny starting to drop now, and I did follow your advice earlier to try the terminal commands but I have re-connected these other devices as I'm also trying to work.

I have one main boot drive called 'XXX' with one partition,
2nd internal IDE drive ' Current' with one partition
1 FW drive with two partitions 'Video projects' and 'DVD build'
1 FW drive with 1 partition 'La Cie Back-up'
1 FW drive with 1 partition called 'La Cie'
1 FW drive with 1 partition called 'Video-Storage'

"The info about that one drive we were concentrating on above is given by this line:
drwx---rwx 83 dad PV 2856 Dec 2 18:55 Video-Storage
which indicates that the folder at the top of that drive is owned by "dad" and that the group ownership is "PV" (a group to which the "dad" account doesn't belong - does the "son" account belong to that group?) and that the permissions on that one folder are such that all operations are allowed for owner ("dad"), no operations are allowed for users in the group "PV", but (strangely) all operations are allowed for all other user accounts.

Well there aren't any other users so I never bothered changing the 'others', I've just recently caved in to allow my son to use the internet on my computer even though he's 19 I don't think he could handle the tidal wave of muck he'd bump into if he had his own access on his own Mac, this way I can keep an eye on him but I can't afford to let him fiddle with my work so I'm trying to restrict his acces to my working volumes using permissions.

To be honest I think you're right in that I don't fully understand the full ramifications of Owner, Group etc I will have to pay more attention to it but what I have been trying to do at home is how I restrict student acces in college and it doesn't prompt the drives to disappear off the desktop.
Peter

You've got to be kidding. A 19-year old has likely seen lots of stuff that you haven't - unless you keep him chained up in the basement! :)

It shouldn't do that - something else is wrong. Hence the need to take it slow and change one thing at a time while troubleshooting.

Well there's definitwely something peculiar happening.

I'm past the frantic, worried stage now because the drives and the information sems not rto be at all c ompromised, logging in as root and re-mounting the drives brings them back on the desktop in a user account. It might be a red herring but switching users and also fast user switching disables my scanner connection and I have to restart to re-establish it so there is something flaky happening with users and permissions.
I have 10.3 on the Video storage FW drive and when I use it as the startup drive users and accounts performs normally!!
I've taken up a lot of your time and thank you
What i might do is simply erase and re-instal when I get a bit of work done, would you agree there seems to be a corruption somewhere?
Peter

I don't know about it being corruption. But I don't know why the drives would unmount.
A reinstall might not be bad idea.
But I would still recommend just taking it one step at a time.
Ignore your scanner for the moment. Stop switching users - just stay with the one "dad" user. Set the ownership & permissions on that one drive using the commands I recommended before. Unmount & disconnect all other external drives. Now does that one drive behave properly?
Log out of the "dad" account and then log in as "son" - don't use fast user switching. Is "son" properly restricted?

Do both filesystem repair on your internal disks and that one external one. Then do permission repair on your internal disk - the one you booted from.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

Only once the basics are verified should you go on to try something different.

Already done disc verify and repair a couple of times on boot drive and 2nd IDE and problematic FW and got 'no repairs were necessary'. I'll get back to it again in the morning and report back.
Peter

just curious are the drives ever losing power when they go to sleep or when your machine goes to sleep. I didn't read thoroughly through the whole thread, but I have seen weird issues with data corruption because drives were being unmounted or shut down improperly due to corrupted power management. It's probably not your problem but if you cannot come up with anything else maybe look into it.

I've never had a monments trouble from any of the drives until I tried to set permissions to restrict access. It gets weirdder. I have one FW drive in two partitions, 'Video projects' and 'DVD build', I set permissions on the 'Video projects partition and the 'DVD build partition fails to show on the DT yet Disc utility sees it, allows an option to 'unmount' it, which I do, apparently then alllows an option to Mount it, but fails to mount it.
I have to log in a root, when the drive mounts automatically then log back in as my usual admin a ccount when the drive mounts automaticallly!
I'm baffled. BTW no idea what sudo rm -rf /* does.

How did you set the permissions on the "Video projects" partition? What are the ownership & permissions set to?
What about the other partition?
Show us the results of the following commands (copy & paste both the commands & the results):

ls -ld "/Volumes/Video projects"
ls -ld "/Volumes/DVD build"

Is the one drive "Video-Storage" (that we dealt with above) working properly?

Are there any relevant error messages showing up when you run the "Console" application? (under /Applications/Utilities) Look for messages around the time you mounted that drive.

I don't see anyone referring to that, so I'm not sure why you mentioned it.
But that command removes (rm) all of the files and folders under the "/" (top level) folder on the drive you are booted from. I.e. it would be a very bad idea to run it!

yeah don't listen to my quote, I only do that when I am mad at a machine and data is not an issue.

Permissions are as follows when logged in on my admin account 'Dad'
Video projects partition
You can read and write
Owner Dad
Access read and write
Group Dad
access read and write
othwers read and write
clicked Apply to enclosed item

DVD build partition, I never touched the permissions on this partition but they read as follows
youj can read and write
Owner unknown
Access Read and write
Group Dad
access read and write
others no access ignore ownership box not checked

Here's the response from the terminal command
Last login: Wed Dec 7 14:26:20 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
host86-142-193-8:~ dad$ ls -ld "/Volumes/Video projects"
drwxrwxr-t 48 dad dad 1666 Dec 2 13:43 /Volumes/Video projects
host86-142-193-8:~ dad$ ls -ld "/Volumes/DVD build"
drwxrwx--- 43 501 dad 1496 Dec 5 23:58 /Volumes/DVD build
host86-142-193-8:~ dad$

Video storage is working and mounting, touch wood

Here's a a ref to the Video storage problems in console

'Dec 7 11:02:56 fatboysmac diskarbitrationd[36]: disk3 hfs 64E080C6-0178-3D95-A662-57239DB13B99 La Cie Back-up [not mounted]
Dec 7 11:02:56 fatboysmac diskarbitrationd[36]: disk4s6 hfs 276E5B20-C40C-3A71-8C65-6E7AC0E7D790 LaCie [not mounted]
Dec 7 11:02:56 fatboysmac diskarbitrationd[36]: disk5s2 hfs 780374C2-AA26-32EE-A087-2D9A87396473 Video-Storage [not mounted]
Dec 7 11:02:56 fatboysmac diskarbitrationd[36]: disk2s9 hfs 8BF9C512-1412-3C2F-8BC1-8D65AB090E46 Video projects [not mounted]
Dec 7 11:02:56 fatboysmac diskarbitrationd[36]: disk2s10 hfs 6224A42C-7484-301D-B70F-7EC138AED160 DVD build [not mounted]
Dec 7 11:02:57 fatboysmac diskarbitrationd[36]: disk1s10 hfs 4506ED82-6254-3DDD-8BFC-68B51A1314C7 Current /Volumes/Current'

TLARKIN above in the thread recomended sudo etc but as I wasn't sure about doing it I have waited for your advice, too many cooks etc

BTW here's a ref from Disc utility when it was reading the drive which it saw as 'mounted' but which wouldn't appear on the DT, curiously it's reporting 0 files and 0 folders but upon successful remount in root all files and folders are intact.
Name : Video & Storage
Type : Volume

Disk Identifier : disk5s2
Mount Point : /Volumes/Video & Storage
File System : Mac OS Extended
Connection Bus : FireWire
Partition Type : Apple_HFS
Device Tree : fw/node@10b90020002592/sbp-2@c000/@0:2
Writable : Yes
Universal Unique Identifier : 780374C2-AA26-32EE-A087-2D9A87396473
Capacity : 114.5 GB (122,942,287,872 Bytes)
Used : 0 Bytes
Number of Files : 0
Number of Folders : 0
Owners Enabled : No
Can Turn Owners Off : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : Yes
Supports Journaling : Yes
Journaled : No
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 5
Partition Number : 2

rooneytunes, that is not true. The command you are referring to is currently in tlarkin's signature, it is not specific to you. It is supposed to be a joke, as the command erases everything on the hard drive that can be erased with a command on the same drive as the command is held.

tlarkin, considering that many people reading your advice don't recognize the joke, and don't understand that it is your signature and not advice intended specifically for them, and considering that many people are eager to try any advice that they see without parsing it for the wisdom of that advice, perhaps it might be a good idea for you to change your sig?

Trevor

Your advice is understood and I'm glad I was wary of mr Larkin. I certainly didn't at a quick glance twig on that it was his signature and a joke, it would be easy for folks to make the same mistake, it might be a temptation to ridicule folks who make the same mistake but there are diifferent kinds of 'smart' and then there are 'smart Alecs'
Thanks

well, you are the first person whoever asked about it, but I will change it to something not as potentially dangerous.

btw, I'm not a smart alec:eek: :D :cool:

Ahh - that explains why I didn't see it since I have signatures turned off (I never see them).

quick everyone make jokes about hayne in your sig

/just kidding:D

The "Video projects" drive ownership & permissions is okay. It's a little bit strange to have the "sticky" bit on that drive. If you don't know what the sticky bit is then I'm guessing it got there by accident.
I'm referring to the 't' at the end of the permissions.
You could make this drive like the "Video-Storage" one by running the commands: (copy & paste them into Terminal)

sudo chown -R dad:dad "/Volumes/Video projects"
sudo chmod -R o-rwx "/Volumes/Video projects"

The "DVD build" drive doesn't have the correct ownership and this is possibly what is causing the problems with it. You should fix it by making the ownership & permissions like the other drives with the following commands:

sudo chown -R dad:dad "/Volumes/DVD build"
sudo chmod -R o-rwx "/Volumes/DVD build"

Is this the one that was named "Video-Storage" earlier?
It's a bit confusing if you start renaming things in the middle of this.
I thought "Video-Storage" was now working fine.

No didn't rename anything I was simply showing you some earlier references from the console during the problems.

Happy to follow your adv ice but please explain why it doesn't have 'correct' permissions, this permissions thing is frying my head.
and please translate those two commands
Peter

The translation is as follows:

sudo: this is "super user do". It is a command that allows an admin user (by default) to temporarily act as the root user. It also allows an admin user (by default) to temporarily act as any other user on that system, so some people mistakenly think that it means "substitute user do".

chown: this is "change ownership". It is a command that allows a user with the correct rights to change the ownership of files or directories.

-R: this makes the chown command Recursive. That means that the change will apply to the folder you are pointing at, and all the files and folders inside of that folder, ad infinitum.

dad:dad: this is the user (dad) and the group (dad) that the folder and it's contents will be owned by when this command has completed.

"/Volumes/DVD build": This is the target folder that the command is changing, along with it's contents. In this specific case, this folder is a drive, but this command will work on any directory that is used as the target of the command.

--

sudo: already explained above.

chmod: "change file modes". What this command does in simple terms is change the permissions. If you look at a directory in the Terminal, you will see a long string of characters, something like drwxrwxrwx. These are the permissions. For example, drwxrwxrwx means that this is a directory (the initial d) and that the owner, the owner group, and others have permission to read, write, and execute. This is a very shallow brief description, a good tutorial can be found here.

-R: Recursive, as explained above.

o-rwx: Simply put, this means to remove (the -) read, write, and execute permissions (the rwx) from others (the o). That is probably difficult to understand with so little explanation, so you may just have to trust me on that count.

"/Volumes/DVD build": The target directory of the chmod command.

I hope that helps.

Trevor

I said it didn't have correct ownership.

The line:
drwxrwx--- 43 501 dad 1496 Dec 5 23:58 /Volumes/DVD build
shows that the top level folder on that drive is owned by a user with numerical user id = 501 and no such user exists on your machine. This is why Get Info in Finder is saying owner unknown.

So if I buy a new drive and format it I have to manually tell that drive that I am the owner, am I following this correctly?

Thank you Trevor, good of you to take the time to explain that, it makes sense now

Well, first off it is obviously nothing to do with being the legal owner of the physical object. We are talking about the Unix ownership of the files and folders on the drive.
I would assume that the user who does the formatting is assigned ownership of the toplevel folder (which is all that exists after a formatting).
When users (that user or others) create sub-folders, those sub-folders are owned by the user that created them.

Here' some interesting discoveries
ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_drive would report 'no such drive or directory' in those drives which had spaces or hyphens in their name. Those drives were the ones which had been disappearing off the DT when I tried to apply permissions or had 'owner' as 'unknown' and which would default to 'unknown' when I changed 'owner' in the finder and which would not let me apply permissions changes without reporting error 213.
From my own conclusions it seems that all along Tiger has not liked the name structure, has not even recognised it at times and I think this has been at the root of my problems.
I altered all the names of my drives to remove all spaces and hyphens and
ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_drive reports properly on them all now.
I think I might be on to it now, any more developments and I'll let you know.
What do you think?

Were you putting quotes around the names, or else escaping spaces? If you note hayne's chown and chmod commands, he was using quotes around the directory names to make them work properly:

"/Volumes/DVD build"

If you are missing those quotes, another correct way is to "escape" the spaces using the backslash, using syntax such as

/Volumes/DVD\ build

Note that before the space, there is the backslash character.

Either way above should work to get an ls of a drive with a space in the name. So, to use concrete examples,

Correct
ls -ld /Volumes/"DVD build"
ls -ld "/Volumes/DVD build"
ls -ld /Volumes/DVD\ build
ls -ld '/Volumes/DVD build'
ls -ld /Volumes/'DVD build'

Incorrect
ls -ld /Volumes/DVD build

Trevor

I copy pasted Haynes commands with quotes. Nearly got all the wrinkles out for now, last puzzle now is that Videostorage has 10.3.9 on it for emergencies, has worked up to yesterday, now a restart into Videostorage gets me the circle with the diagonal stripe, NO ACCESS, option key before startup sees the drive and startup disc in System prefs sees the drive but it's no go.
Permissions on the drive are for access to everyone to RW
Is there a command to wipe ALL permission s etc on a disc 'cause I'm sick to the teeth with this.
Peter

Sorry, it looks like my post above got mangled somewhere. I just fixed it, so I hope what I was saying now is clear.

You were speaking of how you got a 'no such drive or directory' message when entering ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_drive where there were spaces in the drive name. This is correct behavior--you need to escape spaces, or quote them. See my (reconstructed) post above.

Trevor

It makes no sense to talk about wiping out all permissions.
The commands I have given you above are the way to go.
If you are having problems with the ownership or permissions, you need to show us the results of the command:

ls -l "/Volumes/name_of_drive"
where of course you substitute the actual name of the drive for name_of_drive
(and recall from above that the command is "ell ess minus ell")

Sorry I've confused you, the names I refer to are the names on the drive icons on the DT, when I changed them to remove spaces and hyphens etc
ls ld sees reports on their ownership properly.
Is there a command to wipe ALL permission s etc on a disc 'cause I'm sick to the teeth with this. Its 1:14 am in Ireland so I'm off to sag in front of the TV for half an hour before hitting the sack.
Thank you all for your patience and determination I'm learning a lot.
Peter

Hello Hayne your post just appeared.
Here's the result of the command you just gave me

Last login: Thu Dec 8 00:33:42 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
host86-143-134-24:~ dad$ ls -l "/Volumes/Videostorage"
total 15677400
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 5094 Oct 5 2002 Log File
drwxrwxrwx 52 dad dad 1768 Nov 23 17:45 Alias Applications
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 200704 Jun 4 2003 AppleShare PDS
drwxrwxrwx 116 dad dad 3944 Sep 9 19:59 Applications
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Dec 2 13:21 Applications (Mac OS 9)
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 May 24 2004 Audio Render Files
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Oct 11 2004 Capture Scratch
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 17287 Jun 3 2002 Contacts Export
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Sep 27 2003 DVD Player.app
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Dec 2 13:38 Desktop
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 15 Apr 17 2005 Desktop (Mac OS 9) -> /Desktop Folder
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 241664 Dec 2 15:39 Desktop DB
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 1553794 Dec 8 00:13 Desktop DF
drwxrwxrwx 21 dad dad 714 Dec 2 13:25 Desktop Folder
drwxrwxrwx 5 dad dad 170 Jan 31 2004 FCP prefs
drwxrwxrwx 5 dad dad 170 Apr 26 2005 FCP4 Book Files
drwxrwxrwx 8 dad dad 272 Jan 31 2004 Final Cut Pro Documents
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 96818 Oct 5 2002 IE Install Log File
drwxrwxrwx 7 dad dad 238 Jun 25 20:10 Incomplete
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 171 Dec 2 13:25 Installer Log File
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 1500 Sep 24 2003 InterLok Support Install Log
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 105633 Sep 12 2003 InterLok Support READ ME.pdf
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 128512 Jan 13 2004 Letterhead 2000
drwxrwxrwx 40 dad dad 1360 Apr 2 2004 Library
drwxrwxrwx 3 dad dad 102 Dec 2 13:20 Microsoft
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 38912 Aug 29 2004 Minute to Peter Rooney as 11 2
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 6463228 Feb 12 2005 NAVMac800QSFile
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 1459246 Nov 2 2002 NAV??? 7.0 QuickScan
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Apr 17 2005 Network
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 823808 Oct 6 2004 Norton FS Data
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 100 Sep 9 2002 Norton FS Index
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 102400 Oct 6 2004 Norton FS Volume
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 8015360 Oct 6 2004 Norton FS Volume 2
drwxrwxrwx 7 dad dad 238 Nov 26 12:24 QuickTime
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 0 Nov 6 1999 Register
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 27648 Jun 27 2002 Reply to Peter rooney as 21 6 02.doc
drwxrwxrwx 9 dad dad 306 Aug 15 2003 Snow 2001 home
drwxrwxrwx 5 dad dad 170 Apr 9 2004 System
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 272634 Dec 15 2004 TTP4 Installer Log
drwxrwxrwt 4 dad dad 136 Oct 18 10:52 Temporary Items
drwxr-xr-x 4 dad dad 136 Jun 2 2004 TheVolumeSettingsFolder
drwxr-xr-x 3 dad dad 102 Sep 10 01:51 Trash
drwxrwxr-t 6 dad dad 204 Apr 16 2004 Users
drwxr-xr-x 7 dad dad 238 Mar 9 2004 VIDEO
drwxr-xr-x 2 dad dad 68 Jan 30 2004 Video projects
-rw-r--r-- 1 dad dad 6291457276 Nov 24 14:14 Video.dmg
drwxrwxrwt 10 dad dad 340 Dec 2 18:57 Volumes
-rw-r--r-- 1 dad dad 19959888 Jan 11 2004 WORLD TRADE CENTER ALL VIDEO CLIPS OF THE DISASTER.mpg
drwxr-xr-x 21 dad dad 714 Jul 6 13:54 WW1 footage
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 1687967174 Dec 24 2004 apple_Final Cut Pro 4.5 Hd.dmg
drwxrwxrwx 4 dad dad 136 Apr 17 2005 automount
drwxrwxrwx 35 dad dad 1190 Nov 26 2004 bin
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Apr 17 2005 cores
drwxrwxrwx 2 dad dad 68 Apr 17 2005 dev
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 11 Apr 17 2005 etc -> private/etc
-rwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 836 Sep 7 2003 iNode41392531
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 28160 Feb 10 2005 invoice to springboard
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 2794849 Jun 1 2003 iserror.log
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dad dad 9 Dec 2 18:55 mach -> /mach.sym
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 570256 Dec 2 18:55 mach.sym
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 3863440 Oct 10 2004 mach_kernel
drwxrwxrwx 6 dad dad 204 Dec 2 18:55 private
drwxrwxrwx 62 dad dad 2108 Dec 13 2004 sbin
-rw-rw-rw- 1 dad dad 3624 Jul 30 2002 small_grey_badge.gif
drwxrwx--- 29 dad dad 986 Dec 6 16:24 spillover
lrwxr-xr-x 1 dad dad 11 Apr 17 2005 tmp -> private/tmp
drwxr-xr-x 9 dad dad 306 Apr 13 2004 usr
lrwxr-xr-x 1 dad dad 11 Apr 17 2005 var -> private/var
host86-143-134-24:~ dad$

Well, the problem with the 10.3.9 files on that Videostorage drive is that the ownership is wrong. You didn't mention that there were system files on that drive. The files that belong to OS X need to have particular ownership & permissions.
I think it is too hard to fix up the ownership & permissions of the system files on that drive - you'd be best to back up the data files (not the system files) that you want from that drive, then erase the drive and then reinstall 10.3.9 (if you still need it - given that you have Tiger, I wouldn't bother)

And note that when you have installed OS X on a drive, you aren't supposed to go sticking other files & folders at the top level. That sort of thing is fine for your data drives, but for a system drive, you should in general not touch the top level of the drive - all of your data files on a system drive should go under your home folder.

Good morning.
The history of that drive is that it was data storage only but whenever I make a new system HD and get it working cleanly I clone it to a storage drive to have an emergency backup, it has worked fine until now. I had been hanging onto 10.3 because of all the glitches reported in Tiger especially the slew of problems around QT and this especially affects my video and DVD work.
I think your advice is correct, back-up and reinstall

You have so many drives - you should make a partition of the right size for this sort of backup and then reserve it for that use - don't put anything else on that partition.

Yep, I do that on my main boot drive, nothing in that partition but system and applications.
I'm zeroing the Videostorage drive at the moment and I hope that's the end of it. I've taken up a lot of your time and thank you, I understand a lot more now.
Peter