# Permissions issues with External HD



## Jonah Corvus (Mar 18, 2008)

I hooked up my WD external hard drive to an OS9 machine a little while ago and now a few of the folders in the drive have little locks on them. Come to find out permissions have been screwed up. Going into the info and attempting to change the permissions doesn't work... disk utility does not work. Any ideas?


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## CharlieJ (Mar 18, 2008)

Go back into OSX. Open disk utility. Select the drive. File. Fix Classic Permissions.


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## Jonah Corvus (Mar 18, 2008)

alright well when i get there it says "fix OS 9 permissions" but is greyed out.


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## VirtualTracy (Mar 19, 2008)

Jonah Corvus said:


> I hooked up my WD external hard drive to an OS9 machine a little while ago and now a few of the folders in the drive have little locks on them. Come to find out permissions have been screwed up. Going into the info and attempting to change the permissions doesn't work... disk utility does not work. Any ideas?



Did you try to change the Permissions of the Folders on the drive or did you copy a folder to the Desktop first?

Is the OS9 machine a OSX/OS9 Mac or just OS9?


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## Jonah Corvus (Mar 19, 2008)

Well all the folders are folders that stay on my external, i'm using an intel macbook that's only OSX, my friend acquired an old CRT iMac with OS9 that i was tryin' to clear up for her. I did notice that the files are mostly ones that i transferred from a PC though. oh and another thing i've already tried is accessing disk utility from my OSX disc instead of from the hard drive.


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## Jonah Corvus (Mar 19, 2008)

Alright i just tried moving one of the folders to my desktop and i was able to change the permissions. so the problem seems to lie in the external HD.


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## Jonah Corvus (Mar 19, 2008)

Trying to solve the problem, I attempted to move some of the locked folders to the desktop then delete them or change the permissions and move them back, but this did not work because it only copied the file instead of actually moving it. So the locked version was still in the HD.


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## VirtualTracy (Mar 19, 2008)

Yeah, that is something I'm not 100% clear as to why, but I'm not convinced it's a problem as such with your Ext HD and I wonder if you created a new account on the OS9 Mac that had the same name as your account on the OSX Mac, whether the permissions would be appeased? 

The workaround seems to be to copy the folders to the Desktop then copy them back to the ext HD ... not optimal but unless someone comes up with another idea that's all I can think of.

I think the reason why you reported earlier that _"Fix OS 9 Permissions"_ is greyed out on your OS X Mac is that you don't have Classic installed.


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## CharlieJ (Mar 19, 2008)

How about trying this: 

 Backup your data from your external drive on your OSX machine.
 Plug the external into OS9
 Format
 Test read/write
 Plug the external into OSX
 Put data back on.
 Plug External in OS9
 Try it 

Hope this helps


CJ


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