Work bought me a new MacBookPro last month. The laptop had issues with crashing from the beginning. Finally took it to the Apple Store. They reported they could find no issues and re-imaged the disk.
I've been restoring files from all my backups (DropBox, Super Duper images, and Time Machine image). I've been trying to cherry-pick the restored files using Finder and command line rather than the Time Machine utility. Has been a problem.
When the Apple Store re-imaged the machine, they created a user 'test' to run their diagnostic tools. Once I got the machine back, I added myself 'davep'. The 'test' account was uid 501. The 'davep' account was uid 502. As davep was the first user added before, the Time Machine backups were all owned by 501.
I was unable to chdir into several of the Time Machine disk directories. I couldn't even sudo chmod the trees.
http://superuser.com/questions/326645/sudo-chown-fails-with-operation-not-permitted
http://superuser.com/questions/279235/mac-os-x-why-does-chown-report-operation-not-permitted
The chmod was explicitly forbidden by ACLs on the dirs. Makes sense. OSX wants to protect the backup files as much as possible.
An "ls -led Documents" for example shows:
drwx------+ 36 501 staff 11220 Dec 20 09:48 Documents//
0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
1: group:everyone deny delete
I highlighted the problem id and attribute. The owner is no longer me (I'm 502, the test account was created at 501). The ACL has forbidden anyone from changing the ownership.
After digging through Stackoverflow and Google, I've been using the following commands to clear up the problem:
sudo chmod -R -a "everyone deny chown" dirname
sudo chown -R davep dirname
The first chmod will remove the "deny chown" on the tree dirname. The second chown will change the rightful owner ship to me.
