Member Avatar for TechTJ

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.

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Good follow-up to and — the Finder "Locked" checkbox is actually a BSD file flag (uchg), not a simple POSIX permission. Clearing that flag is the right approach when thousands of files are marked locked. Before changing everything, confirm whether the files truly have the immutable flag and whether the volume is writable.

Run a few quick Terminal checks to inspect flags and the volume (quote paths that contain spaces):

ls -lO "/Volumes/My Book/Music" | head
stat -x "/Volumes/My Book/Music/song.mp3"
diskutil info "/Volumes/My Book"

If ls or stat shows uchg (or uchg in the flags) and diskutil reports the volume is writable, removing the uchg flag recursively (as suggested) will unlock the files. If a chflags attempt fails with "Read-only file system" (as saw), the OS is preventing writes to the volume — common causes are an NTFS-formatted disk (macOS mounts NTFS read-only by default), a drive mounted read-only after filesystem errors, or hardware write-protect.

Practical next steps: (1) Back up the drive before making changes. (2) If the disk is NTFS, copy the library to an HFS+/APFS volume or use a reliable NTFS driver if you need write access. (3) Run Disk Utility (or diskutil) Repair/Verify to fix mount issues, then retry. (4) If the partition shows a lock icon, it may be encrypted/a disk image and will require the correct password to unlock. For large moves, use a tool that preserves timestamps/metadata (rsync or Disk Utility restore). Always confirm data integrity before reformatting.

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Member Avatar for John A

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.

Member Avatar for TechTJ

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 :)

Member Avatar for John A

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.

Member Avatar for TechTJ

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

Member Avatar for Niranjandas

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

Member Avatar for PLOT

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

Member Avatar for Antgrant

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???

Member Avatar for soheldtp

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

Member Avatar for windsphere

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"

Member Avatar for lagankills

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

Member Avatar for spritrig

Doesn't work for me. :(

sudo chflags -R nouchg

chflags: Macintosh HD/Applications/DVD Player.app/Contents/Resources/DVDPlayer.help: Read-only file system

Member Avatar for jmay1234

Thanks for the link, but that didn't actually answer my question

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