Fix non-sticking Ignore Ownership on disk volumes

May 05, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: kirkmc

For some time, I've been having problems with a volume on one of my external hard disks. The Ignore ownership on this volume setting (accessible by selecting a disk or volume, then Command-I), wouldn't "stick". It would reset to off every time I'd unmount the disk. This was problematic for my backup software, since the permissions not being ignored wouldn't let me perform certain backups correctly.

A bit of research--when I realized that I had enough, and figured I couldn't be the only person with this problem--led me to this thread on the Apple Support web site. That, in turn, led me to this page, from the developer of SuperDuper, a backup program.

The solution, as the latter page shows, is to open the /var/db/volinfo.database file with a text editor (such as pico from Terminal; you need to use sudo to access this file), and find a section that looks like this:

290AC3DC4B28C8FC: 00000001 
9A081A3451A451C7: 00000001 
435F42E92DC994B5: 00000001 
C3301F4FEBB1BC41: 00000001F36BADBD7ACFBD6F: 00000001 
F36BADBD7ACFBD6F: 00000001 
F36BADBD7ACFBD6F: 00000001 
F36BADBD7ACFBD6F: 00000001
You can see that one of the lines is missing a Return character. Add the return in pico, save the file, and exit pico. Mount the volume, check the Ignore Ownership box, then unmount it. The next time you mount it, it should work correctly. (In my case, I had to do it twice to get it to stick.)

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