Mac Hell and the realm of Lost Permissions

Hell and damnation. Hell and damnation and back again. The Snow Leopard Update I ran on my "new" MacBookPro stalled, via the iCloud, but due to slow DSL, it also locked all my external volumes to "custom access" and now I can't access ANY of my backup hard drive files under Info/Unlock. Not exactly progress.

Some Terminal codes I get are: drw-rw-r-T and an uchg flag. Anyone know Terminal, or UNIX? 

Someone asks: Can't Disk Utility's "Repair Permissions" come to the rescue? Restoring permissions—and there were lots of them—did not help. No reboot success. No, that's system file permissions. This is much deeper—at the UNIX root level. Ironically Disk Utility is what got me into this mess to begin with—I couldn't fix all the file permissions so I got the bright idea to reinstall Leopard, and do something about it. Mistake. 

FIrst round loading Snow Leopard from Leopard was OK— then when I ran the Combo update to 6,8, all manner of hell broke loose. My MacBookPro is an inert nert—it's stuck at the gray Apple logo. It's hanging. And nothing will unstick it, not even rebooting in Safe Mode. Oh, and it has no working screen. The inverter's gone.

My little MacBook 1.1 (2006!) trumpeting like a baby dino, came to the rescue. It accidentally loaded Snow Leopard, so I went with it. Been trying to update that little MacBook for ages—to no avail. So now it decides it's a good time to load Snow Leopard. WTF?

MackBook, why couldn't you have done that years ago when Snow Leopard first came out? I would have loved you longer. Why upgrade now, when you've been kicked to the obsolete technology closet?

OK, not kicking gift horses in the teeth. Niiiice MackBookie. Goood MackBookie. I have a working computer. I can access the internet.

Snow Leopard Update locked all my external hard drives. Not what I was expecting. Clearly the past does not want to let go and I'm dealing with a couple of jealous cats hissing and getting all turfy on me. If I can get that poor stuck drive to load—I might have better luck unraveling the dilemma.

I ran Terminal and discovered the uchg flag, AKA user immutable flags. What? Sounds so mysterious. Piet Bess says this is a "sticky bit" issue. Do some research about clearing the sticky bit. sudo chmod 775. Awp. It's all Greek to me. I don't DO Terminal!  OK, well....

I learned that the "uchg" part means it is locked. It also a symbol for barfing. Under Info, the "Locked" check box is not an option. Nor are the permissions wheels available. Accessing my files in a read-only mode is not an option. That padlock and "custom" access means I can't even OPEN them because I don't have sufficient "privileges."

I found this: Under Terminal, type:

• cd /Volumes
• chflags -R nouchg Portable\ HD
• The command will perform an unlock on the HD and recursively unlock every file and folder on the drive.

Too sticky a wicket for me. So I reached out to my favorite Mac Guru. MacWorld maven Chris Breen said to use Batchmod. Voila! Magic ensued. Permissions restored. One. By. One. Slow progress. But I was kissing Chris's proverbial feet. I had a way in.

I may have accidentally changed the permissions on a 3rd party app that shouldn't have been locked. I hit return without thinking, and it "unlocked" all my Apps files—or so it said. Wonder if that's the root source of the cascade? At least all 3 HDDS have the same warning codes...

Meanwhile I have a poetry reading Sept 29, Watershed Poetry Festival & 100 Thousand Poets for Change— and I can't get into my hard drives in order to retrieve poems!!!! Luckily I have hard copies of many poems, and they're also posted on my blog. Will have to make do. We've a reading on Friday 28th, at Berkeley High School too.

9/26 Today, I had a modicum of success. But I still need my files on the desktop. I had one working OS system loaded onto a USB drive—it took three ports to find the right combo. Running the OS from the USB drive, I was able to rescue my desktop files. 

This means I can also clone a drive and pop it in—but I'd rather get the original drive working. It needed to authenticate all files when I tried to move them—so permissions are whacked—probably the source of the locked external drives. 

Robert Peake asks: Are you still under AppleCare? A nice genius could probably sort this out for you pretty quick... I had to laugh. At this point I was in so deep, I probably knew more than the Apple Genii. Are you kidding—these Mackies are older than durt! 2006. Made about the time some of the Apple techs were born.

This is the part where I used one elderly MacBook, long in tooth, to fix a fancyass MacBook Pro. I won't mention that I used my MacBook's old Tiger drive to unravel this dilemma, I had updated the MacBook to a SSD drive. I don't worry about MacBook's older 32-bit addressing vs the MBP's superior 64-bit addressing conflict. I swap drives. It works. But I still needed my desktop files. Not a hardware problem. MBP works. Unswap drives. Progress.

I eventually bought a new hard drive, swapped them out, then cleaned and cloned everything, and was up and running, but it took days of diligence, and stealing wifi that was faster than ours, so I could access the updates. 

Batchmod's logo is a bat. I had bats in the bellfry and bells in hell were ringing off the hook. It was a slow roast, but Batchmod saved the day. Albeit slowly. Can't recommend it enough.

I discovered my old Word 5 files turned into rogue Unix files when I joined this decade's operating system, but that's another story.

Moral of the story, reloading a tried and true operating systems does not necessarily guarantee smooth sailing. And Never NEVER never never have any hard drives attached when updating software. Especially your backup hard drive, and its backup hard drive. I could've lost everything. And I do mean everything. 

from a FB post, added rev. 9/17 

It still needs major revision, it's not a story, it's notes, but I'm uploading it anyway as a gruesome reminder. I still have some errant locked files buried deep, but Batchmod is now in my fixit toolkit.

This is the annotated backstory of my MBP I wrote in 2013. Hindsight.

Macury Retrograde Or what could go wrong with my flies upgrading to Snow Leopard? I got a Craigslist special—an ailing, headless first generation MacBookPro (MBP's code name: Santa Rosa) with—shall we say—issues? I rolled up my sleeves, ponied back my hair, scraped off the thrashed music stickers, and got to work. We had beauty. Well maybe, in the eyes of the beholder. It looked pretty sick. I hammered out the frame, steelwooled it, and got everything connected up, including all the hard-and software workarounds.

I loved my new MBP—and was it fast. That 64-bit intel processor ran smoke rings around my elderly 2006 Macbook. Until I decided to reinstall the system. Let's just say that the online Apple software (OSX.6.8) update hung. Things went further south—thanks to ATT throttling my DSL speed to near-zero. Not good to have flailing DSL when you're in the middle of an online software upgrade.

My new MBP was an inert pile of metal, I tried to move on with my creaky vintage white plastic first generation 2006 Intel MacBook (which doubles as a lapcat, it runs so hot).

My two trusty back-up drives, and my shiny new Plan C Seagate GoFlex PC wifi drives were attached to my MBP when I was upgrading the software on my MBP—what could go wrong? Lockdown, that's what. Little padlocks on all my files. And little padlocks on all my back-up hard drives. Permission denied. Poof! Now, I had no software, no files, no back-up files!

I tried every trick in the book—I was locked out, it was hanging, mid-install. And ALL my back up drives: plans A, B, & C were inert lumps of cybercoal. Moral: NEVER leave external drives attached when doing a software upgrade. Never.

I was also trapped in some kind of weird install hell without access to a working backlit screen, let alone, a blue screen of death. Did I mention the MBP was not only sans functional computer screen (the backlight was out); it was also sans working optical drive—so a DVD disk install (the normal method) wasn't an option. I was running out of workarounds.

I managed to yank the bleeping stalled MBP hard drive out, and I stuck in my original old MacBook Tiger drive. (Remember that 32-bit part?) Shockingly, the tiny 2006 Apple drive (why I yanked it in the first place was its size) worked.

I cloned the working Snow Leopard OSX.6 from my white 32-bit MacBook hard drive to a new hybrid SSD hard drive from OWC. I popped the cloned hybrid drive into the MBP.

The cloned SSD hard drive fired right up. It worked—despite a 32/64-bit software differences of opinion.