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