Comments on: Permissions error SNAFU causes Leopard not to boot [solved]

By: spool

spool — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 08:44:45 +0000

I recently experienced the same error after having set the entire volumes’ privelleges for everyone from ‘read only’ to ‘no access’. Then I experieced the whole #%#$load of boot-up problems, as described above. In search for a solution I tried everyting as explained above, but to no succes. Then I tried a range of solutions myself. What finally worked was booting up from an backup which will allow you access to the volume that gives the error. Don’t use an application like Disk Utility (it gave an performance error and didn’t fix a thing), but manually change back the privelleges by selecting the volume, selecting ‘get info’, and then at the bottom change privelleges for everyone back from ‘no access’ to ‘read only’. Afterwards, use Disk Utility to set things straight.

By: jordan314

jordan314 — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:30:56 +0000

Wow thisSGMchumni, sounds like a mess.
When you say you “upgraded” your wife’s iMac to a faster cpu and larger HDD, what do you mean? Is it possible to even upgrade the chip on the iMac or do you mean you exchanged the iMac for a better one? If the problems started when you upgraded the hardware, maybe it’s a hardware issue. Is the chip seated correctly, are the hard drive cables plugged all the way in, etc.?
Jordan

By: SGMchumni

SGMchumni — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:35:48 +0000

Hi jordan,

Thanks for writing this thread and being so helpful. However, i have constructed a possibly bigger SNAFU than yourself. In all of my infinite curiosities, a few weeks ago I decided to “upgrade” my wifes iMac to a faster cpu and larger HDD. However, the mac has been acting very buggy since. to the point that I restored all of the factory components and did a clean system folder install while keeping all of our older files intact. The startup times have seemed to increase for both the OS and apps that I decided to verify disk, and repair permissions…

well, all this to no avail…

I found a utility called IceClean to clean up the caches… seemed to be doing better…

however, I am back at square one minus 5 i think…

I found applejack and did a deep clean from single user mode…

Still acting funny,

I booted in safe mode and verified disk and permissions again… then decided to manually delete all caches…

it seemed to be doing ok… the apps seemed to be more responsive… load times were still slow…

then I upgraded to 10.5.6 which seems to be causing me the most problems…

I started having the same issues as strider, and so I tried booting in single user mode like you suggested…

Kernel panics… kernel not found… boot from leopard disk, ran terminal… inputted code that you suggested…

‘fsck -y’ seemed fine
‘mount -uw/’ invalid option error
’sudo chmod -R777/’ unknown command

I still can not get into single user mode because of kernel panic

then while trying to boot into safe mode this screen turned up , never seen this one before…

anyhoo,
I am not sure if you might have any suggestions on what you would try if in this sort of predicament.. I myself am very unfamiliar with under-workings of UNIX terminal commands, however, I see this as a challenge and love the opportunity to learn something new. Thanks for any input.

By: jordan314

jordan314 — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:03:15 +0000

Digits9 make sure you run
fsck -y
Then type:
mount -uw /
Then, type
sudo chmod -R 777 /

By: digits9

digits9 — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:10:21 +0000

Also, if I type exit twice, the computer will reboot…again and again and again and again…

By: digits9

digits9 — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:57:29 +0000

I’m still having problems with this…

…I’m running 10.5.6, and have run the two commands prior to:

chmod -R 777 /

but when I type exit I still get the
’single user boot – fsck not done’
‘Root device is mounted read-only’
errors…

Someone PLEASE Help!!

By: Problems to Solve » ‘No access’ greyed out for user Everyone in Leopard File Sharing [unsolved]

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:40:51 +0000

[...] greyed out for user Everyone in Leopard File Sharing [unsolved] This is a follow up to my previous post about locking the system out of itself by trying to set “Everyone”’s priveledges [...]

By: d_version

d_version — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:43:07 +0000

I have multiple Macs, so I booted into target disk mode and changed the permissions that way.

Seems to be back to normal.

Hope this helps…

By: jordan314

jordan314 — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:30:50 +0000

Yup, your disappointment is justified. This seems like a pretty big design flaw on Apple’s part given how many people are doing this. It was a lot harder to kill your system in Tiger.

By: shrock

shrock — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:53:33 +0000

first day with my new MacBook Pro….switched from windows. Did a get info on Macintosh HD….saw Everyone having Read only access…didnt like that….changed to “no access”….computer DEAD….not very impressed that its this easy to kill. Tried help here but SUDO would not run….some sort of permissions error….I know squat about UNIX…nothing was on it yet so erased the drive and reinstalling MAC OS X now…I’m really dissapointed that something that seems pretty logical and is so easy to do…..click…click….with NO warnings can completelly hose the OS.