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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)

[–] 1 pt

Do you get an error when you use chown/chmod?

No errors, no.

You might wanna join the chat at this point and post the solution here later when you solved it.

Sad, but I am on a conference call while doing this. I'm going to have to try again tonight when I can focus. I do appreciate the effort, bossman!

[–] 0 pt (edited )

su

Password: (enter your root password here.)

chown -R "your_non_root_username" /Path/to/Guest

ls -la /path/to/mac/drive/Users

Paste the results here (hide real username folder)

[–] 0 pt

Hmm. I just noticed something. When I enter "sudo chown -R bernardo Guest" I see all of the results have the following (or similar):

chown: changing ownership of 'Guest': Read-only file system

Then the results of the la -la command are:

la -la Guest total 0 drwxr-xr-x 1 201 201 11 Mar 8 2014 . drwxr-xr-x 1 root 80 6 Mar 8 2014 .. -rw------- 1 201 201 0 Mar 8 2014 .CFUserTextEncoding drwx------ 1 201 201 3 Mar 8 2014 Desktop drwx------ 1 201 201 3 Mar 8 2014 Documents drwx------ 1 201 201 4 Mar 8 2014 Downloads drwx------ 1 201 201 26 Mar 8 2014 Library drwx------ 1 201 201 3 Mar 8 2014 Movies drwx------ 1 201 201 3 Mar 8 2014 Music drwx------ 1 201 201 3 Mar 8 2014 Pictures drwxr-xr-x 1 201 201 4 Mar 8 2014 Public

[–] 0 pt

Read-only file system

God dammit! I asked you to check if your Mac volume was mounted as read/write! lol

You have to unmount and remount it with write enabled.