[Ulises Bacilio]

Thansk so much you people, god bless you all, Mac are awesome machines, but this is really an Issue, I can see I am no the only stupid that tries to preserver his information from being readed from someone else. Again thanks a lot.

[Marzen]

Thanks CharlesS! You saved my life.

I had an "unknown user" with read and write permission to my HD... didn't sit well with me so I removed it. Then I removed "everyone" or something like that...

[Actit]

Macbook Pro 10.6.5

On sharing and permissions for the HD.
I added a user to the HD giving them read and write privileges.
I then applied to enclosed items.
Upon restart the mac would not boot past the Grey screen.

Have tried all of the above commands without luck.
Any suggestions?

[Spheric Harlot]

Reinstall the currently installed OS from the Install Disk, using the "Archive and Install" option to keep intact all user and preference data.

[AKcrab]

If he's reinstalling 10.6, there won't be an "Archive and Install" option. He'll just need to go ahead an install.

[Actit]

Thank you for the replies!
I'll see about getting a reinstall done today or tomorrow.

Out of curiosity does anyone know why it won't boot up?
Would love to know some of the specifics of what I screwed up so I can understand my error better.

[CharlesS]

Beats me. Frankly, it seems like Repair Permissions should be able to solve that kind of problem. If it doesn't, this probably qualifies as a bug in the Repair Permissions feature.

[Actit]

Thank you for the reply.
I thought so too. But repair permissions is grayed out when I use the OSX install disk.

[arustagi]

Having the same problem, in my case I changed the entire HD permissions (including subfolders!). I tried the Chmod commands, confirmed that they worked using ls -l, but still no boot. Do I need to change all the permissions on all files on the hard drive, and is there a recursive way to do this? I am in hot water.
Also, booting from install dvd results in Disk Utility repair permissions saying "cannot verify permissions due to failure on exit." Verify disk says disk is normal. Am I hopelessly ruined? Mac OS 10.5.9

[Actit]

For me I booted the changed HD permissions laptop into Target Mode
(Hold down T on boot up)
and transferred all the files of the user to another laptop.
Then I did a reinstall to the changed HD permissions laptop with an image.
-Actit

[arustagi]

Yeah, I was afraid of that. Right now I have installed OS X onto an external hard drive and have booted off of the external. I backed up critical data and I'm running repair permissions from the external's Disk Utility, which says it will take 6 hours and appears to be changing essentially every file. Presumably this will fix everything, if not, I'll reinstall OS X.

[Actit]

Please post your findings. I'm interested to see what your results are.

[arustagi]

Disk utility off of the external finally finished. I then tried DU off of the changed hard drive as well, no missed files. But still no boot. So I had to archive and install to fix the problem for good.

[Mr.3]

I've been using a Mac for 6 months now and I too killed my machine in the same fashion. I was using a public wifi hotspot and I saw other computers in my finder sidebar. I was concerned if they could access my information, so I did a "get info" on my master drive. I saw that "everyone" had read access to my drive and I figured that wouldn't do, so I changed it to "no access". That was a week ago. Over the course of a week I saw weird things like I wasn't delete an application in my application folder, it said I didn't have permission as opposed to asking for my admin password. I thought it might have something to do with the removing "everyone's" access, but I couldn't change that setting any more when looking at my drive's "get info" window. This evening I did a reboot to see if that would help anything (it didn't!) and I found myself stuck with the "blue screen". I was traumatized because I was pretty certain I had caused my problems, but I didn't know enough about how to describe the problem, or even what the correct terminology was. Shoot, I had never heard of or needed "safe mode" or "single user mode", so it took me a handful of tries to even get to single user mode to be able to follow these directions. Thank you all in this forum for the excellent information. I know where I'm going for help from now on.

[zerep]

Hey guys, I too am having similar problems although I do not know if it is for the same reasons. I have recently inherited a macbook from my ex-roommate who claimed that it was "garbage" since he could not get past the grey apple logo screen with the spinning circle. Instead of letting him toss it, I gladly took it off his hands and began to search for ways to fix it.

So far I have found out that it will boot into single user mode but not into safe mode. I tried to boot from a disc but for some reason the laptop will spit out any disc in about 15 seconds. I have run fsck only for the computer to tell me that:
The volume Glenn HD appears to be OK

Anytime I try to run a command that starts with diskutil it will return:
Unable to run because unable to use the DiskManagement framework.
Common reasons include, but are not limited to, the DiskArbitration
framework being unavailable due to being booted in single user mode.

When I run sw_vers it returns
(a bunch of numbers followed by) unable to determine UUID for host. Error: 35
ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.5.8
BuildVersion 9L31a

Sorry if I am posting this in the incorrect forum but I feel as though I have searched everywhere without finding an answer or even people with a similar problem. From what I have read, you guys seem to be the most helpful and have the closest symptoms. I have tried some of the stuff shown here like the chmod stuff but I don't think it is a problem with permissions(I could definitely be wrong).
If this is the wrong forum please point me in the right direction at least. Or if you need any other information about the mac I would be glad to give it.

Thanks in advance for the help. I certainly could use some!

[CharlesS]

Since you just got the machine, it can't have any of your data on it. Why not just reformat and reinstall?

[zerep]

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, I would love to format the drive and do a fresh install, but wouldn't that require me to boot from a disc? As I stated in the first post, the disc drive will not accept any cd's. It just spits them back out after a few seconds. I read somewhere that the disc drives on these macbooks tend to give out easily. I think that this is the case with my machine. Is there a way to reinstall without using the disc? That would be great.

On another note, I said that I didn't think it was a permission issue before, but I have now noticed that when I boot into single user mode, among other things, the prompt also reads:
Singleuser boot -- fsck not done
Root device is mounter read-only

I don't know if that changes anything or if it means that this is indeed a permissions issue. hopefully that sheds more light on my situation. Thanks

[CharlesS]

Do you have another Mac around? You could stick the install disc into it and boot it into FireWire Target Mode. Another thing you could try is to image the install disc onto a USB flash drive and boot the MacBook from that.

[zerep]

Unfortunately I am currently teaching abroad in Guatemala. The only person I knew who had a mac was my roommate and he is gone now. Most everyone else here has a pc. I have not yet tried to boot the computer from an OS image on a flash drive. However I tried to boot Ubuntu onto it from a flash drive and that did not work. I remember reading that macs cannot boot from a flash drive. Any idea if thats true or not? The way I tried with ubuntu was to hold down option while it booted, this gave me a list of mounted devices to boot from but it only showed the hard drive and not the flash drive or anything else.

[CharlesS]

Macs can boot from a flash drive, but with the newer firmwares they've come out with, they restrict it to OS X. It's asinine, but nevertheless shouldn't affect an OS X system imaged onto the drive. Use Disk Utility's Restore pane to do the imaging.

The other obvious option is to buy a cheap external USB or FireWire DVD drive.

[zerep]

Thanks for the help CharlesS. I finally got it working. Hopefully this may help someone who is in the same weird predicament as I was. Here are the main points: my MacBook would not boot from hard drive and the optical drive was broken so it could not boot from a disc either. I had no access to a another Mac so I couldn't create a bootable drive, technology is not cheap in Guatemala so buying anything such as an external dvd drive was out of the question. Fortunately I had access to my Windows 7 machine and an external hard drive (a large enough flash drive would also work) and a disc with mac OS X (an image will also work such as a .dmg file.)

I did some research and found that it is possible to create a bootable external hard drive for macs using windows. However, all of the options such as TransMac and PowerIso required me to reformat the entire external hard drive even if it was partitioned (something I was not willing to do). The only option I found that would let me keep all of my files on the external hard drive while also using a partition of the drive as a boot disk was Macs very own Disk Utility. As I mentioned before I did not have access to a working mac. To solve this I ended up making a virtual machine running Mac OS X on virtualbox. From the virtual machine I partitioned my external HDD and created a bootable version of the OS on the partition using Disk Utility. Then I booted the real physical macbook from the external HDD and re-installed the Mac OS X. Everything is working fine now.

Keep in mind that this solution will erase everything on the macbooks hard drive, that includes all important files such as documents, pictures and music. This is something that I was fine with. Also keep in mind that this is just an overview of what I did, in reality it was a long process with many, many steps (setting up virtualbox to work with Mac OS X was a project in itself, well at least for me it was.) This may not have been the most elegant solution but it was the only one I could think of that would get the job done. Thanks again for the replies and I hope this helps someone out there that was having the same issues as I was.

[nuyorkster]

One fine day, I went in and changed Permissions on everything in Finder so that only I (owner) has Read and Write access to everything while Everyone/ Staff/ wheel (?) etc. have no access. After that when I tried to open Applications in Finder, it said I don't have access to it. I couldn't change anything back in Permissions and Sharing. When I clicked on Settings (to change Accounts), it didn't open and showed a Question Mark. Same for Stickies, TextEdit... So I thought I'd restart and fix it. Big mistake! Now my computer won't start up at all - the spinning wheel doesn't stop. I've tried the Shift Safe Mode method but the Safe Mode bar below the Spinning Wheel stops midway and the wheel continues spinning. I am abroad so don't have access to the disks either. Hallelujah! I was able to restart my Mac using advice from this thread. This sequence worked
mount -uw /
chmod 755 /System
chmod 1775 /Library
chmod 1777 /Users/Shared
reboot

All my data is safe but except for Finder, Dashboard and the Applications Folder, all other icons in my Dock are question marks. How do I fix that?

[CharlesS]

This is about exactly the thing that Repair Permissions is designed for. Run that, and it should solve your issues.

[nuyorkster]

Yeah well :o) since I did not have access to any Applications I couldn't run Repair Permissions without gaining access to it. Luckily I was able to give myself access and then run Disk Utility - permissions etc.

[tomaslieberkind]

Hey guys,

Thanks for a great thread! I'm glad to see that a lot of people get their problem solved.
I too have this morning messed up my permissions, only, at least I think, I took the stupidity to the next level.

I got info for my main drive (Macintosh HD) and changed permissions for "everyone" to "read & write". The stupidity lies within the fact that after I had done this I pressed settings (the little cogwheel at the bottom) and clicked "Apply to enclosed items". I couldn't cancel this, and after a short while, I started to get error messages from different files, none of which I can remember the name of, saying something about that they were not working properly. As I couldn't do anything I force-rebooted the computer. When it turned back on again, the booting sequence didn't get past the Apple logo and the spinnig wheel. The computer in question is an 24" iMac from August 2009, shipped with Leopard. These are the things I have tried to do to fix the problem, but with no luck:

I haven't got the Mac OS X install CD that shipped with the computer, but I have one from a 13" MacBook Pro, also from August 2009. I popped that in, booted from the CD and did a disk repair / disk permission repair. This didn't help.

I then tried to boot into safe mode, but wasn't able to.

Tried to boot into single user mode and do the following:

Code:
mount -uw /
chmod 1775 /
reboot

No luck.
I also tried doing this recursively (with the -R flag on chmod) as I applied the permissions to all enclosed items on the disk, still no luck, though.

Finally, I tried to use fsck, also from single-user mode, as described here, still with no luck. All I see is the Apple logo and the spinning wheel.

So, I'm able to boot from an installer-disc (not the one shipped with the computer, so not allowing me to re-install OS X), I can boot in single-user mode but not in safe mode.

I apologize for the wall of text, but I'm getting quite desperate to solve this!

Thanks in advance!

[CharlesS]

Repair Permissions only works if you boot from an install disc containing the same version of OS X as what's on the HD. So if your hard drive has 10.5.x on it, and the MacBook install disc had 10.6 (for example), it wouldn't work. Make sure the install disc you're using is for the same version of Mac OS X that you're running, and try it again.

[verysassy]

Hi all,

I seem to be having the same problem described in this thread. I have an older (~2008ish?) Macbook Pro running OS 10.5.8. I stupidly changed the permissions on the whole drive and enclosed items for the "Everyone" user to no access. (Sidebar: I have to second the sentiment that this appears like a potential security issue. Why would Apple allow us to do this?!) Anyhow, a minute or so later, Time Machine failed. I attempted to reboot. It now hangs at the blue screen before the logon. Note that I can't find my installation disks to save my life. I've turned my office upside down looking for them.

Per instructions here and in other forums, I've tried running /fsck several times until I got the message that the hard drive was okay. I also attempted to change the permissions back with chmod o+r /, chmod o+x /, chmod 775, chmod 1775. Nothing has worked.

As I mentioned, I don't have an install disk for 10.5. I do have a copy of snow leopard on the way, because I was getting ready to upgrade to lion anyhow. I do not have data on this drive that I need to salvage, and time machine was working fine yesterday morning anyhow.

Per Charles last post, I guess I cannot run disk utility / repair permissions with the snow leopard disk. What are my other options?

Can I do an erase / install with the snow leopard disk? I saw one post that made me think that might not be possible because I made the drive not writable.

Somewhere I saw this information might be helpful:

If I run ls -ld, I get
drwxrwxr-t
....... which is NEW! as of last night I was getting the same thing only ending in "-x". I attempted to change it to the t, but couldn't get it to work. Maybe my last effort before I called it quits was successful.

If i run ls -ld /users, I get:
drwx---r-x

ls -ld /Volumes, I get:
drwx000r0x@ 3 root

Getting desperate!

Thanks,
Sandra

[CharlesS]

Just install Snow Leopard onto the drive. Snow Leopard is better than Leopard in pretty much every way, and the install disc doesn't care about permissions since it runs everything as root. Once you've got SL on the drive, you can just run Repair Permissions from the SL disc and you should be golden.

[verysassy]

Super, okay! That was the plan, good to know it should work. Thank you!

[brienyc]

Hi. same result, but it happened in a different way. We had a power outage and when l turned my macbook on, the next day it wouldn´t get past the blue screen. I had been having a bit of trouble, but it never stopped starting up. While on the blue screen it will go between the spinning and the cursor. It will also dim. I have tried the safe mode, i´ve tried the single use mode and nothing seems to happen, unless i´m doing it wrong. I wait for the sound and press the commands. I am not in my country so i have no access to my original startup disc.

my biggest concern is my pictures. any help getting this computer started would be greatly appreciated, but beyond that, should l need to get a new computer, does this sound like a problem that would prevent from getting things off my hard drive? I´m not as computer savy as some, but i´m trying to figure this out without spending money on something i might be able to fix myself.

thanks again for any help.

[goalgappa]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

You don't need Terminal. You have a shell in Single User Mode. Boot into single user mode, then run the following commands:
[codex]mount -uw /
chmod o+r /[/codex]
Then she can restart. That will reverse what she did.

I'm surprised the OS will allow you to do this without warning you. That ain't good.

I sadly am in the same predicament. I changed all the HD Permissions on my Mac Pro (4 Hard Drives including the main one) to only me (the administrator) having Read/Write and everyone else having No Access; after logging out, the system would not even shut down properly, getting caught with a blue screen. Upon restart, it seems to boot normally, but then stops just before you would expect the logon screen to appear, with a blue screen.

The excellent solution you've proposed above was my next port of call, but maddeningly, although I can easily get to single user mode command prompt, one at the command prompt, the keyboard stops working -- I can't type anything! I am using a wired USB Apple Mac keyboard (though have tried a few others to make sure it's not the keyboard itself and same thing -- can easily get into single user mode so the keyboard IS registering at startup, but once at the command prompt itself in single user mode, nothing doing - I can't type your solution in as the keyboard doesn't work).

Any thoughts friends? I'm stuck in HK with crucial work on this Mac Pro so getting it back to normal would be a boon. I'm wondering whether I should go out and buy a copy of Snow Leopard and boot from that DVD + see if the keyboard will work from Terminal Mode from DVD boot - if so, maybe your fix will work then.

Any thoughts appreciated! Thanks.

[kronicusprime]

I too stupidly set permissions on my hard drive for everyone to no access. Nothing worked... couldn't open terminal (or any application for that matter) and don't have my install disc. I used the following commands as suggested and upon reboot she fired up perfectly.

mount -uw /
chmod 775 /
chmod 1775 /
reboot

I just wanted to express my deepest, heartfelt thanks to the geniuses who post here in the hopes of helping people they don't even know. You people are awesome and your help is incredibly appreciated!

Cheers!

[atfirstsight0]

Like the user below stated, I too have never registered on a forum before. But i had to in this case. it is almost 2am. 3 hours after i mistakenly changed the permission on my computer to "no access" the steps below are the ONLY steps that corrected the problem. THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH.

Originally Posted by Wildflower 

THANK YOU ALL for taking the time to post. This is the first time I've registered on a message board and I only did so that I could give thanks to all those that try to help the rest of us.

I've been looking for the answer since 11 & it's now 4:27 a.m. I tried EVERYTHING this was what finally worked thank God! I'm a new Mac user and I've read so many post where the person who committed this 'mistake' got ripped a new a-hole for being an idiot.

And to all those people rippin on us for being stupid, let me say to all of you STFU if you don't want to be helpful and btw... Anyone with a modicum of common sense upon seeing that 'everyone' {as opposed to 'system' (which I THOUGHT was the BIG no-no to change), 'admin' (which I think is me, but hell, maybe the admin is really Steve Wozniak's secretary)} has sharing, read & write permissions to their hard drive would NOT change to the permission to 'no Access'.

1st of all, Why in HELL would there even be a need for anyone to essentially kill their Mac, let alone have an option to do it and w/o warning you that everyone means you too. I mean seriously... The 'no access' option is ONLY available for the 'everyone' category, which further encourages you to think that anyone that hacks into your wireless has total access to your pc?
there I feel better now... it just sucks to think that you've lost all the freaking work you've done since your last TM backup and then have people ripping you apart on top of it!!

This thread is great, and someday when I have time I think I'm going to repost it on the 543 other threads that are looking for the answer. And to think... most of them are wiping our their hd and reinstalling....