Facilis Technology, Inc. Technical Note
TN-033
Unlocking a Mac Volume
A volume on the Mac desktop will have a visible locked icon preventing any data to be added to
the volume. This is do to an incorrect permission set within an invisible file. Follow the steps
listed below to solve the issue.
Note:
Mount the volume with write access on a single Mac workstation. Unmount the volume
from any other workstations during this process.
Before beginning these steps, verify that the root user is enabled (10.5.x). Open the Mac’s
internal Hard Drive and the Utilities folder. Launch Directory Utility. Click the lock icon in the
lower left corner and enter the password for the logged in user. From the top Menu bar, choose
Edit. Select “Enable Root User” if needed. The Root User password can be added under the
Edit menu.
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Open a Terminal window located in Utilities in the internal Hard Drive.
In the Terminal, login as root by typing “su –”, without quotes. Enter.
Enter the password of the Root user. Enter.
After root# type “ls –alO /Volumes” (letters A,L,O), without quotes. Enter.
At this point you should see the problematic volume with “nouchg” listed to the left.
Next type “chflags nouchg /Volumes/<volume name>”, without quotes. Enter.
Next type “chmod 777 /Volumes/<volume name>”, without quotes. Enter.
Check to see if nouchg has been removed. Up arrow on the keyboard to return to ls –alO
/Volumes. Enter.
9) When it has been verified close the Terminal, unmount and remount the locked volume.
Upon remount the locked icon should be removed.
FCP1:~ root# ls -alO /Volumes
total 16
drwxrwxrwt@ 7 root
drwxrwxr-t 38
root
drwxrwxrwx 12
_unknown
drwxrwxr-x 21
root
lrwxr-xr-x 1
root
drwxrwxrwx 1
_unknown
dr-xr-xr-x 7
_unknown
FCP1:~ root#
Technical Note
admin
hidden 238 Aug 11 13:35 .
admin
1360 Aug 6 10:26 ..
_unknown
476 Aug 6 13:20 3500
staff
782 Jun 10 13:59 DX Clone
admin
1 Aug 11 13:31 Macintosh Clone -> /
_unknown
4096 Aug 11 13:35 TOOLS1
_unknown
306 Aug 11 10:45 Tools
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10/22/2009