Recovering data from old harddrive

[-BigMac-]

Hi Guys.

Up till yesterday i had a perfect Yosemite install. Received a boot error i couldn't work around, so i decided to buy an SSD and start fresh.

Installed Yosemite on the SSD, but then it hit me.

I have all my iTunes music and photos on that HDD from yesterday.

I plugged that one in too, and now have a problem accessing the files. They're there, but i don't have the permissions.

Can someone tell me how to get around this, so i don't have to begin my collections from scratch?

Thank you so much

 

[jbarley]

What happens if you do a "Get Info" on the drive and then select "Ignore Ownership"
You'll probably need to click the padlock and 'Authenticate'.

 

[-BigMac-]

What happens if you do a "Get Info" on the drive and then select "Ignore Ownership"
You'll probably need to click the padlock and 'Authenticate'.

That option isnt there.

Once i unlock the padlock with my authentication, it doesnt really do anything.
The ownership settings are still greyed out :/

 

[Taz Mangus]

Hi Guys.

Up till yesterday i had a perfect Yosemite install. Received a boot error i couldn't work around, so i decided to buy an SSD and start fresh.

Installed Yosemite on the SSD, but then it hit me.

I have all my iTunes music and photos on that HDD from yesterday.

I plugged that one in too, and now have a problem accessing the files. They're there, but i don't have the permissions.
Image

Can someone tell me how to get around this, so i don't have to begin my collections from scratch?

Thank you so much

The issue is that the user account created on the old drive does not have the same user ID as the new user account on the new hard drive, even though they are the same short user name account. In order to fix this you need to be logged in as an admin user.

• Login in as an admin user.
• Plug in the external hard drive and make sure that it gets mounted on the admin user desktop.
• Open a finder window and browse the Users folder on the external hard drive.
• Launch the terminal application from the /Applications/Utilities folder
• In the terminal enter: cd <drag and drop Users folder from finder window here>
  In the above command where it says <drag and drop Users folder from finder window here>, using the mouse drag and drop the Users folder from the finder window to the terminal window after "cd".
  As an example, let's say that the mounted hard drive is called oldDrive. In the terminal you would end up entering: cd /Volumes/oldDrive/Users
• In the terminal enter: sudo chown -R <short username> <user account folder>
  In the command above, for <short username> replace with your short user name you are using on the new hard drive. For <user account folder> replace with folder under Users where you are trying to recover the files.
  As an example, let's say that the short user name is bob and the folder name on oldDrive is also bob. In the terminal you would end up entering: sudo chown -R bob bob
  Also, when you see the password prompt, enter the admin password.

A little more explanation on what I think happened. Every user that is created has a unique user ID. All user accounts, with the exception of the root user, starts with ID 501. Everytime that you create a new user account the ID is increment by one. So what I think happened is your user account on the old hard drive has a different user ID then the user account you created on the new hard drive. OS X thinks that your user account on the old hard drive is now different and hence it no longer belongs to you and you no longer have the correct permissions rights to access the folders on the old hard drive. The chown command I gave you above is going to change the user account on the old hard drive to have the same user ID as you are using on the new hard drive.

If the chown command does not work when you enter the admin password, we will need to do the operation as root user. I can help you with that if that happens.