obtaining a permission

[frogstomper]

Hello

I am a new member to this forum. I have almost no experience with forums in general, so I hope I don't violate any protocol.

I own an iMac (6 years old) updated to Lion with several external drives. Recently my wife dropped one of those external HDDs (2Tb WD HDD) and crashed the drive...it happened to be the one with all my important information, documents and life's history way back into the 1985 era. I took the HDD to Data Doctors and they were able to retrieve and restore the files and folders to a new 3Tb WD MyBookLive HDD.

The problem I am having is that when I attempt to access a folder I get an error message stating that I do not have permission to open the folder. I check the INFO and the permission box reads "Custom", and I cannot change it to "Read and Write", again no permission. I cannot move or copy the folders to another drive.

However, I can open files on the root volume just like always. I just cannot open folders to access the files within.

I have tried all I know to do to obtain the 'permission' required, but have failed. Can some good person out there help me with this?

A side note: Data Doctors knew very little about Mac computers. I am sure they retrieved my info from the HDD with a Windows PC. I cannot see how this would affect permissions since I can read the exposed files, just can't open folders.

Thank you for any help you can garner for me.

frogstomper

 

[chscag]

Try logging onto your machine as "root" and see if you can adjust the permissions that way. See this Apple KB article on how to setup the "root" user on your machine: LINK

A word of caution here.... don't attempt to do anything else while logged on as root since it has "super powers" and can make changes to the system which may cause your machine to not boot. Only try to change the permissions on those folders and when you're through, reboot and log on normally.