permission problems with external drive

[liltinke]

I'm having a major problem with getting my external drive icon to appear on the desktop.

I googled to what might be the problem and I found to try disk utility.

Then I remember when I messed with the permissions for the external drive, not thinking it would affect anything.

I did disk utility and I "repair disk" a number of times but still nothing. Also, the "repair permissions" is faded out.

I don't want to give up because I have a lot of info on the drive that I need. Anyway, I keep searching and I find that 'hayne' has helped a lot of people with the same problem that I have. You tell them the code to copy & paste in the Terminal and I do the same thing, except I replace the drive name with my drive name.

Still nothing. I restart the computer, unplug, just what you told them to do. I might have typed wrong in the terminal; wrote a letter out of place or something. Will you help me please? It would be of great thanks.

[hayne]

I assume you are referring to this older thread:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=44391

Just like the multitudinous examples in that thread, you need to show us the results of the commands:

ls -l /Volumes
ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_the_external_drive

[liltinke]

ok , here are the results of the commands:

[Adrianne-Ditlefsens-Computer:~] adrianne% ls -l /Volumes
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Nov 13 07:47 Pearl
drwxr-xr-x 3 adrianne admin 102 Jul 13 07:43 Pearl 1
d---r-xr-x 34 adrianne staff 1190 Dec 5 08:58 Pearl 2
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Dec 14 11:03 Ruby -> /
ls -ld /Volumes[Adrianne-Ditlefsens-Computer:~] adrianne% ls -ld /Volumes/Pearl
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Nov 13 07:47 /Volumes/Pearl

[trevor]

Do you have actual volumes named "Pearl 1" and "Pearl 2", or are those old mountpoints? Or possibly "Pearl" and "Pearl 1" are the old mountpoints, and "Pearl 2" is the mountpoint where the volume actually is?

To restore the standard drwxrwxr-t permissions to Pearl (although I'm not sure that that is the actual target that you want), copy/paste the following command to your Terminal:

sudo chmod 1775 /Volumes/Pearl

...and enter your admin password when asked.

Trevor

[hayne]

Quote: Originally Posted by liltinke drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Nov 13 07:47 Pearl drwxr-xr-x 3 adrianne admin 102 Jul 13 07:43 Pearl 1 d---r-xr-x 34 adrianne staff 1190 Dec 5 08:58 Pearl 2

From the dates on these, I am guessing that "Pearl" and "Pearl 1" are leftover detritus from some previous incident when that drive was not properly unmounted.
So the first thing you should do is clean this up - as follows:
----------------------------
First unmount and physically disconnect all external drives and network drives.
Then use the menu item "Go to Folder..." from Finder's "Go" menu, and then type in "/Volumes" (without the quotes).

Look at the contents of the /Volumes folder.
If you see anything other than the one entry for your internal drive, that is likely the detritus I spoke of above.

Use Finder to trash the left over folders from /Volumes. (If you are sure that no external disks or network drives are connected then this can't affect what is on the external disks.) Finally, empty the Trash.
---------------------------

After that, reconnect your external drive and then restart your Mac and repeat the same
ls -l /Volumes
command (in a Terminal window)

I imagine you will get:

d---r-xr-x 34 adrianne staff 1190 Dec 5 08:58 Pearl
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Dec 14 11:03 Ruby -> /

And now we come to the problem of permissions that you wanted to solve.
The drive "Pearl" has no permissions for the owner (adrianne), so to fix this you should run the following command (copy & paste it) in a Terminal window:

sudo chmod u+rwx /Volumes/Pearl

You will be asked for your password and given a warning about behaving responsibly. Then it should be fixed.

[trevor]

Quote: Originally Posted by hayne sudo chmod u+rwx /Volumes/Pearl

Hayne--a question for you.

While giving ownership to the user, then u+rwx permissions will certainly work for one user, I *think* that the correct procedure (i.e. the one that Apple has set if you don't change defaults) is to leave ownership with root:wheel and set the sticky bit (i.e. 17xx octal permissions). That's how it seems to be set by default on my computer. Is that not correct?

Trevor

[hayne]

Quote: Originally Posted by trevor While giving ownership to the user, then u+rwx permissions will certainly work for one user, I *think* that the correct procedure (i.e. the one that Apple has set if you don't change defaults) is to leave ownership with root:wheel and set the sticky bit (i.e. 17xx octal permissions). That's how it seems to be set by default on my computer. Is that not correct?

I think you are talking about the permissions for the boot drive - i.e. the one that OS X is booted from.
But here we are talking about an external drive, not the boot drive.
With the external drive that I currently have mounted on my iBook with 10.4.8, the permissions (which I don't recall having changed) on /Volumes/name_of_external_drive are:
drwxrwxr-x
and that folder is owned by the user who is logged in and the group ownership of that folder is that user's group.
But it is possible that I changed the ownership & permissions of this external drive - it was several months back when I got it, so I don't necessarily remember.

[liltinke]

Thank you so much! It worked! For some reason I had checked the box that said "Ignore the ownership on this volume"

[sanderfoot@sande]

I have the same problem with an external drive, but this fix doesn't seem to work for me.

The results from the commands above are:

$ ls -l /Volumes
total 8
d---rwxr-x 19 office admin 748 Dec 27 10:56 Drive 500
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Feb 27 16:08 iMac -> /
Office:~ office$ ls -ld /Volumes/name_of_the_external_drive
ls: /Volumes/name_of_the_external_drive: No such file or directory
Office:~ office$


The external drive I'm having trouble with is Drive 500. Andy advice? I know the problem started when I was altering permissions -- silly me.

[trevor]

For a drive whose exact name is
Drive 500
the command would be

ls -ld /Volumes/"Drive 500"

Where Hayne said name_of_external_drive, he means that you need to insert the actual name of the external drive.

Then, of course, you have to continue with Hayne's directions and use the command

sudo chmod u+rwx /Volumes/"Drive 500"

Sidenote: In cases like yours where there is a space in the name, you can put quotes around it as I have shown above, or alternately you can use a \ symbol to 'escape' the next character (in this case, a space). So an alternate way to say the same thing is

ls -ld /Volumes/Drive\ 500

Trevor