954,202 Members — Technology Publication meets Social Media
Username:
Password:
Lost login information?
Have something to say? Contribute New Article Reply to this Article

Unlocking my Hard drive

Hello.
I have a Macbook with OS 10.5 . I Have an external drive that holds all my music over 47,000 songs. And I just recently had to put them all back into my library because I needed to clean up my Itunes (Duplicates started to form and things had got deleted) So I erased the library and then I imported from my external hard drive. well not I can modify the info of my library because the files are locked. And I cant go through and select each file individually. And there are 1000s of folders in there to go through. I was wondering if there was any way I could just unlock everything on the hard drive.

Thanks for the help
Tim.

TechTJ
Junior Poster
125 posts since Jul 2007
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 15
 

Yep, the terminal comes in handy sometimes. Open it (/Applications/Utilities), and run the following command:

sudo chflags -R nouchg ~/Music


Enter your password, and it will remove the lock flag on any file inside your Music directory.

John A
Vampirical Lurker
Team Colleague
7,630 posts since Apr 2006
Reputation Points: 2,240
Solved Threads: 339
 

Thanks, But I need to do it on the external which is labeled my book. How to I specify where it needs to do it . (what the correct syntax for that.)
The Locations for the files are.
/Volumes/My Book/Music
When i type that in to terminal it dosent do anything.

Thanks again :)

TechTJ
Junior Poster
125 posts since Jul 2007
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 15
 

Okay, that's relatively simple - if there are spaces in a filename, you need to use quotes:

sudo chflags -R nouchg "/Volumes/My Book/Music"

I don't know how familiar you are with the terminal, but you do have to hit "enter" to execute commands.

John A
Vampirical Lurker
Team Colleague
7,630 posts since Apr 2006
Reputation Points: 2,240
Solved Threads: 339
 

ya I was hitting enter lol :) it was saying that there was no such directory. I was taught on DOS and im trying to learn terminal but it's a lil different with certain things. Thanks again you saved me hours and hours of time.

Thanks
Tim

TechTJ
Junior Poster
125 posts since Jul 2007
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 15
 

Hello I have a IMac problem is iam pressing power baton its on and come white screen and apple logo and come buffer ring then automatically restart. So iam doing repair the mac os lepod now its come properly but OS partisan ok another 2 partisans is show Lock icon and not opend. I am trying permissions also but its not change. so How to open that partition please Help me lot of data is there Please Help

Niranjandas
Newbie Poster
1 post since Jan 2010
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 0
 

Genius !!! I Findit your Unix tip, I can fix my external harddrive too.
Thanks
Plot

PLOT
Newbie Poster
1 post since Feb 2010
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 0
 

I have a white iMac that I got into via the command line applesetupdone. Once I got in I noticed the finder showed zero KB. The drive is locked as read only. How do I fix this???

Antgrant
Newbie Poster
2 posts since Aug 2010
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 0
 

Hello I have a IMac problem is iam pressing power baton its on and come white screen and apple logo and come buffer ring then automatically restart. So iam doing repair the mac os lepod now its come properly but OS partisan ok another 2 partisans is show Lock icon and not opend. I am trying permissions also but its not change. so How to open that partition please Help me lot of data is there Please Help

soheldtp
Newbie Poster
1 post since Oct 2010
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 0
 

I have a PowerMac 6100/60 and it says the disk is locked. I have not been on a Mac for many years. I am working on getting old art documentation converted to my less old dell latitude. Maybe with your help I can get back to work. I am able to see old disks and after several hours I can see the old Zip 100m disks but not save or convert files. Disk Dr says that the drive is OK I can not launch programs from the internal drive or the zip.

Thank you for your time and help with fixing this if possible. I hope to use these old machines with video capture and I like the old look - We had "robots" that sent images to other artists via slow scan (phone lines) I also work with fabrics and the weaving texture is beautiful - This would not be something many people would want for image "quality"

windsphere
Newbie Poster
1 post since Jan 2011
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 0
 

hi, I have a macbook Pro and I created a seperate disk image so as to have my privete stuff password protected. I FORGOT the password to it, could anybody please help ?

thanks

lagankills
Newbie Poster
1 post since May 2012
Reputation Points: 0
Solved Threads: 0
 

This question has already been solved

Post: Markdown Syntax: Formatting Help
You