MacOS – External Harddrive Permissions Changed / No Access

external-diskhard drivemacospermission

my external harddrive permissions have suddenly changed. I am getting mount errors in Disk Utility when I try to verify the disk. When I Get Info for the drive in question, it states that I have "NO ACCESS", along with SYSTEM, ADMIN, and EVERYONE. There is an EVERYONE at the top that has "custom access." If I try to edit or add permisions for myself, it won't let me.

Last login: Tue Sep  1 16:17:55 on ttys000
Laurens-MacBook-Pro:~ LCLindley$ ls -AOel /Volumes
total 24
-rw-r--r--@ 1 LCLindley  admin  - 6148 Sep  1 16:28 .DS_Store
d--x--x--x+ 3 root       admin  -  102 Sep  1 12:12 Little Travel Buddy
 0: group:everyone inherited deny add_file,add_subdirectory,directory_inherit
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root       admin  -    1 Aug 21 10:26 Macintosh HD -> /
Laurens-MacBook-Pro:~ LCLindley$

I've found a bit of steps that may be helpful in this situation, but I'm hesitant to go screwing around in there without sepcifics to my situation/drive. I downloaded Batchmod to try to fix it that way, but I can't see the drive in question in the files window and I can't seem to name it correctly to help it find it. Thanks in advance for the help! Cheers, L

Best Answer

Please don't use any apps to do this, just open the terminal.

Try taking ownership first:

sudo chown -R LCLindley.admin /Volumes/Little\ Travel\ Buddy

then try fixing permissions so you can actually read and write it:

sudo chmod -R 755 /Volumes/Little\ Travel\ Buddy

Related Solutions

External harddrive changes name sometimes

If your hard drive mounted with a "1" at the end, that means the system was somehow holding onto the volume before you had plugged it in again, making it think another volume with the same name was plugged in. Since it can't give an identical path to two items, OS X will add a "1" to the end (which shouldn't be permanent).

As far as the NTFS question goes, I recommend reformatting your drive in a FAT format. If you are sharing with WinXP, use FAT-32. If you are sharing with Win7, use exFAT. Be sure to backup all data first as the reformat will wipe the drive. NTFS is read-only on a Mac which has obvious limitations for you.

MacOS – necessary access permissions

Reset Your Home Folder Permissions and ACLS:

1) Boot into your Recovery Partition holding down command + R at the startup chime

2) Select 'Terminal' from your Utilities Menu Bar

3) Type: resetpassword

4) From the window that appears, select your boot volume and the appropriate user account

5) Click the Reset Tab under Reset Home Folder Permissions and ACLS

6) Close the pane and quit Utilities

7) Select your boot volume when presented with choose startup disk and reboot your machine

Edit (Courtesy of @Buscar's Point):

If you don't have a Recovery Partition present, you can perform the same reset while logged in using the Terminal Command below. Triple click the line, copy it, and paste it into your prompt. Supply your password when asked:

{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR.. ; sudo chown -R $UID:staff ~ $_ ; sudo chmod -R u+rwX ~ $_ ; chmod -R -N ~ $_ ; } 2> /dev/null

Command credit goes to Linc Davis of Apple Support Communities.

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