Welcome • User Guide
ToS • Privacy • Canary
Donate • Bugs • License

©2025 Poal.co

600

OK, gurus. Here's a fun one.

I have an old 3.5" drive from a buddy's iMac. The machine died but I was able to pull the drive and connect it to my Ubuntu machine. I see all of the folders but some of them have that damned little red X on them telling me I don't have the required permissions to access them. How do I; 1) force a permissions change, or 2) force the copy process anyway so I can give him the files on a thumb drive?

Thanks!

OK, gurus. Here's a fun one. I have an old 3.5" drive from a buddy's iMac. The machine died but I was able to pull the drive and connect it to my Ubuntu machine. I see all of the folders but some of them have that damned little red X on them telling me I don't have the required permissions to access them. How do I; 1) force a permissions change, or 2) force the copy process anyway so I can give him the files on a thumb drive? Thanks!

(post is archived)

You are currently inside a comment thread.
Click here to see all the comments (54).
[–] • 0 pt

Mount it like you did before and then just issue a "sudo mount" command. That should list all mounted partitions and their status.

[–] • 1 pt

Mount it like you did before and then just issue a "sudo mount" command.

All I did was connect it to my laptop with a USB adapter.

[–] • 0 pt

I forgot Ubuntu tries to mount things automatically. Connect it, open a command window and do sudo mount. You should get something like the image (that's from a SBC, so it won't be exactly the same.)

https://pic8.co/sh/YFyOnQ.png

Look at the first parameter in parenthesis. Here, it says rw, for read-write. I suspect your drive may have ro in there instead. If that's the case, you'll need to so something like:

sudo mount -o rw /mnt/the_actual_drive /mnt/where_you_want_it

If it says it's busy you may have to umount -f /mnt/drive and try again or use -o rw,remount.

Warning: This shouldn't damage anything on the drive, but there's always a risk with HFS because Apple.

[–] • 1 pt

but there's always a risk with HFS because Apple.

Which is why I am being careful. And thanks for the tip, of course!

[–] • 1 pt

Yep. "ro" it is.

/dev/sda2 on /media/bernardo/Macintosh HD type hfsplus (ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,umask=22,uid=1000,gid=1000,nls=utf8,uhelper=udisks2)

When you say "the_actual_drive" do you mean "/dev/sda2" or something else?