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Locked out of External Hard Drive and can't read/write to it.

I'm running a PowerBook G4 with two external hard drives for my media files. When I run iPhoto, I store the files on the external hard drive to keep my local hard drive empty. Last night I was doing some system maintenance and noticed a number of Volumes on my local hard drive that were taking up a lot of space. I deleted them along with some other large files I don't use. This morning I tried to open iPhoto and I got an error message stating the hard drive was locked. Is there a way to unlock this external hard drive so that I can regain access to those iPhoto files?

The files and folder still show up in Finder and I can go through the folders but I can not open the files. Time Machine is also affect and can not back up because it's a read only drive. I can open other files on this computer. It seems to be affecting the mac programs. Please help.

Keith

Eoin OSullivan

When you see folders inside the Volumes folder .. these are actually the mounted drives and not junk folders. Deleting them can have SERIOUS repercussions.

What you have done is to attempt to delete the entire contents of these external drives.

To regain ownership of all files on the external drive you'll need to add permissions back to all the files and folders.

If you do a Get Info on a file or folder on the USB drive. What users are listed?

keiher

ASKER

I got a little carried away with the deleting process. I ended up deleting four different versions of the Lacie 2d Volume folders. Three of them needed deleting because they were redundant back-ups from when my system crashed and took up more than half of my hard drive space.

When I look at he Get Info/Sharing & Permissions: it has Me listed for Read & Write, Unknown listed and Read only and Everyone listed as Read Only.

DJDecay

What version of Mac OS are you runnning 10.5.4?

keiher

ASKER

I'm at work now... not at my Mac but it's the lastest version. I've been upgrading and updating every chance.

keiher

ASKER

I'm running Mac OSX 10.5.5. I just tried to fix the permissions with disk utility and it says it can't because the drive is read only. I also tried running Disk Warrior... but got the same results. I can see all the files, I just can't open them. Any suggestions.

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DJDecay

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DJDecay

it explains all about mount points and use of vifs etc... most likely you deleted the automount point while residue was left over for the firewire UUID etc...