System folders/general drive permissions

dcow90

Registered
All the system folders that are usually invisible (tmp, user guides and information, usr, var, etc.) on the root of my Macintosh HD volume show up now.

I upgraded my hard drive a few days ago. I used carboncopy to clone the drive but accidently formatted the new hdd in the apple file system and not GUID. I didn't realize this however until I had already installed the new hard drive after the copy.. so basically I was running leopard on a drive formatted with the old apple files system. this shouldn't have been a major problem and it wasn't. Everything worked fine except Finder used to quit after it loaded when the computer booted. I would get an error message saying:

exc_bad_instruction (sigill)
0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000

thread 14 crashed: (sometimes it would be 12)
0 0 + 4752148

Then finder would start again and everything would work like normal.

I erased my old hdd and used it as a Time Capsule. I backed up my system. To get rid of the error on startup I reformatted the new hdd with the proper file system, reinstalled os x, and restored my files and settings from my time machine backup. I did not do a complete restore, only restored the user account, files, network settings, and apps.

Now, I can see all the system folders on my system drive, and sometimes I get random encounters (as in when emptying the trash) with the "you need permission to do this message".. but if I enter my password, it works.

So I think I'm safe to say have have an admin user account (it says that in system prefs) but something is screwed up allowing me to see too much.. Normally this wouldn't bother me as I like to know/see things but I know my mac is reliable so I don't need to have constant access to it's inner workings. I just repaired the permissions on my system disk so hopefully that will fix the access privileges issues but it didn't fix the fact that I can view all the system folders.

Any help at all is appreciated. Thank you.

David
 
The partition options you can have selected are GUID partition scheme, and Apple partition scheme, or MBR.
Are you sure you didn't mean 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' as selection? That would be just the formatting of the disk, and the correct format to use. If you picked anything else you probably want to format it again to the correct format. Which of course would be a better option here if your old HD contained the system in its working status..

IF the correct formatting was already selected... there is still something very messed up in your system currently. At least the permissions.
Run Disk Utility and repair permissions. It should at least see what system permissions are wrong. The invisible folders should be invisible... so we need to get them with the correct visibility again. Run Disk Utility more than once if it finds a lot to fix (which will most likely be the case).
 
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