[stefls]

Hi fellow Mac-people,

At the moment I'm having this slight problem with permissions, as illustrated by this iMovie alert (I was trying to add an audio-file from the iTunes playlist):

"The file could not be played because it couldn�t be opened. The file may be missing or damaged, or you may not have permission to open it."

In iTunes the file plays without problems. All audio files that are stored on the startup partition show this behaviour. All files stored on a second partition can be used in iMovie.

So, I thought: "Well, let's do a disk permission repair". And that's what I told Disk Utility to execute.

The result was an *INCREDIBLE* amount of files being examined, tagged having wrong permissions, which for some reason could not be repared. Follows a sample of the output:

"2003-12-09 17:39:49 +0100 - Repair of privileges has started
User differs on ./Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/Info.plist, should be 0, owner is 501
Owner and group not corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/Info.plist, reason Operation not permitted
Permissions not corrected on ./Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/Info.plist, reason Operation not permitted"

Et cetera, it goed on and on and on and on.

As a root user I get the same problem.

Does anyone have a single clue of what might be the problem?

Thanks in advance!

Stefan

[rlmorel]

This is normal, though unsettling, I am pretty sure. As long as you repair them, it should not be a big deal.

[stefls]

Originally posted by rlmorel:
This is normal, though unsettling, I am pretty sure. As long as you repair them, it should not be a big deal.

Yes, but that's exacly the problem. Look again at the output; Disk Utility obviously tries to repair the privileges, but for some reason fails in doing so for every single file ('Operation not permitted').


Stefan

[Thinine]

Lauch terminal and type:

Code:
sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

Type your admin password and it will repair your permissions.

[SMacTech]

The owner of those files should be marked as system. The uid of 501 indicates it is owned by you. Therein lies the problem.

[stefls]

Originally posted by Thinine:
Lauch terminal and type:

Code:
sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

Type your admin password and it will repair your permissions.

"The privileges have been verified or repaired on the selected volume"

Thank you!

[Chris Grande]

I have had this happen on some systems, basically Disk Utility losses its permissions so it can no longer repair other files permissions, not sure what causes it. Glad that you are up and running again.