Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems "Deep Repair" on OS 10.7

An interesting article in many respects regarding repairing permissions on folders and documents: Really Repair on Lion.

The article does point out that this capability has always been present, but it is now more accessible. And it also reveals how your Mac's password could be maliciously changed by someone with physical access to your machine.

This all seems to directly result from the presence of a repair partition that Lion creates during installation.

The most revealing thing about that article is that the author's knowledge was curiously behind the times.

The info about the Terminal command now necessary to access the functionalities discussed is new to me, though.

Thanks for the link.

Thanks, Ira! Very interesting and hopefully useful.

Thanks Ira. I never would have divined that solution, and even if I stumbled upon it, I would have promptly exited once advised to enter resetpassword in Terminal

I wonder why this fix is so obtuse and deeply hidden.

seems macosxhints made small mention of this a month ago.

This ability was added in 10.5 (due to ACLs being standard), but we had to boot from the system dvd.

IMO, this functionality should exist as a (totally) separate pane in Disk Utility.


MFI aficionados may recall i once wrote a shell script which accomplishes much of the same (wrt ACLs anyway).

I'm more inclined to say "hopefully useless!"

I don't quite get what you're saying there.

1. The author of such a blog should have been aware that repairing home permissions has been around since Leopard, but he's reported it as something totally new to him.

2. I hope I never have need to know how to access any of the functionality discussed in the article.

It seems the author stumbled (?) upon all of this trying to resolve a problem and the information he reports allowed him to fix his problem.

Artie is right—we all hope we don't have to go there because we don't have severe problems, but after reading posts here and on the original MacFixIt, I know some of you guys will go there just for the fun of it!

Update: already of use to someone! Artie suggests a version of the process in this posting.

> It seems the author stumbled (?) upon all of this trying to resolve a problem and the information he reports allowed him to fix his problem.

My point was that with credentials like

"Techblogger, computer columnist, blog editor @ Houston Chronicle chron.com. Co-host of Technology Bytes radio show. Computer book author."

he should not have had to learn about repairing home permissions from AppleCare, and two versions of OS X after the fact, no less; it was a well-covered new feature in Leopard.

> Update: already of use to someone! Artie suggests a version of the process in this posting.

Unfortunately, though, for naught.