I backed up the contents of an old Macbook which was probably running 10.5.8 by copying ~/Pictures and ~/Documents to my WD MyBook, right before the laptop died with the click-of-death, which probably indicates a failure of the hard-drive.
Fortunately all I care about on the old machine were the documents and pictures, but sadly, when I try and view the contents of those back-up folders in finder I get a pop-up window that says:
The folder “Pictures” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see it’s contents.
I can open the directories in the terminal app and even dump the contents of the files to the console, so I don’t think it’s a unix permissions issue. And none of my googling has found a fix to my problem. Specifically, I get these errors when I try the various proposed solutions I’ve found so far:
>sudo chmod -N Pictures
chmod: Failed to clear ACL on file Pictures: Operation not supported
>sudo chown jdthorpe Pictures
chown: Pictures: Operation not permitted
And if I highlight the file in Finder, click cmd-I to view the file info and try and modify the Sharing and Permissions, I get a error stating:
The operation cant be completed because you don’t have the necessary permission.
Finally, DiskUtil won’t reach the back-up folders since they’re on a network drive.
In case it’s useful, calling ls -lash yields this entry:
0 drwxrw-r--@ 1 jdthorpe staff 264B Apr 16 2011 Pictures
Any help is greatly appreciated!