[anonymous.magi]

Hi,

This story is going to be a little convoluted, but the short of it is that Mac OS X won't let me manipulate the files on my external hard drive and I'm trying to understand why and fix it.

I have a 200 GB drive in an external FireWire case. The name of the volume is 200GB_External. Azeurus (BitTorrent client) is set to save its downloades to a folder named Torrents on the root level of the 200GB_External volume. One day I launched Azeurus without having the external drive attached, it didn't warn me, and I forgot it was set to save to that drive. So Azeurus silently created a new folder named 200GB_External in the /Volumes folder in Mac OS X, and saved its downloads at the appropriate path inside that folder. This was weird since the files it downloaded where now not visible in the Finder since /Volumes is a hidden directory and it didn't mount the 200GB_External folder that Azeurus created as a volume in the Finder.

Recently I noticed that I was "missing" about 10 gigs of hard drive space on my boot drive. After lots of investigation I discovered that hidden /Volumes folder with the 200GB_External folder and 10gigs of hidden content. It was interesting, because after Azeurus created that 200GB_External folder and I then attached the real 200GB_External drive it now caused the real 200GB_External drive to be named "200GB_External 1" inside the /Volumes folder, but it still displayed as 200GB_External on the Finder desktop.

I asked on the #Macdev channel on freenode IRC if it was OK to delete the 200GB_External folder in the /Volumes directory in Mac OS X and they said yes. So with the real external drive disconnected I deleted the "200GB_External" and "200GB_External 1" directories in /Volumes. Then when I reconnected the external drive I can copy items to it, but I can't move files around on the drive, or copy items off of the drive!

This is what the /Volumes directory now looks like:

[ssebeny@Quicksilver:/Volumes]$ ls -al
total 24
drwxrwxrwt 6 root admin 204 Aug 26 03:00 .
drwxrwxr-t 33 root admin 1224 Aug 25 09:30 ..
-rw-rw-rw- 1 ssebeny admin 6148 Aug 26 02:09 .DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x 19 ssebeny ssebeny 748 Aug 25 14:14 200GB_External
drwxrwxr-t 31 root admin 1156 Aug 24 05:32 QuickSilver
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 1 Aug 25 09:30 Tiger -> /


It looks like the owner of the external drive is now my user (ssebeny) instead of root (which I guess it should be). I assume this is the cause of why the Finder can't manipulate the files on it. Can someone please please please tell me how to correct this issue so the Finder can properly manipulate files on this drive again? I will be very appreciative! Thank you!

[CharlesS]

What error message do you get if you try to copy a file off of the drive in the Terminal, using the cp command?

[techtrucker]

I had a similar problem once, it may be unrelated but check the following:

Do a Get Info on the external drive. Under Ownership & Permissions see if the "Ignore ownership on this volume" is checked, if not check it.

Hope that helps!

[anonymous.magi]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

What error message do you get if you try to copy a file off of the drive in the Terminal, using the cp command?

From the Terminal everything works fine. I can cp a file off the drive with no problem, and I can mv files around the drive with no problem. The issue is that I can't do anything in the Finder. When I try to move a file in th Finder to another directory on the external drive the Finder just never accepts the drag. (You know how when you do a drag th destination folder becomes selected when in list view when you hover over it, or the destination window gets a highlight ring around it if draging to another Finder window, well that never happens when I drag a file from the drive.) Drap and drop in the Finder works fine for other drives. And if I try to drag from the drive to the Fider's Desktop a little image like the "no smoking" sign appears on the cursor.

[anonymous.magi]

Originally Posted by techtrucker

I had a similar problem once, it may be unrelated but check the following:

Do a Get Info on the external drive. Under Ownership & Permissions see if the "Ignore ownership on this volume" is checked, if not check it.

Hope that helps!

Unfortunately it was already checked. I have tried unchecking it, and rechecking it, etc. But it seems to of had no effect.

[techtrucker]

What about logging in as (or temporarily creating) a new user? Have you used Disk Utility to repair permissions?

[CharlesS]

Sorry for the obvious suggestion, but have you tried rebooting yet?

[anonymous.magi]

Well, I went to run repair permissions on the external drive, but I couldn't do that because apparently you can only repair permissions on a drive that has OS X intalled on it. So then I booted up from the OS X CD to repair permissions on the boot drive. While that was running I tried the external drive on the neighbor's Mac, and it worked fine there. When I got back and booted my machine back up from the internal drive it was working as normal again. So I'm not sure what fixed it exactly, but at least its working again!