After recovering my Macbook Pro using the OS X Archive and Install. I had to manually restore all my documents and settings by dragging and dropping everything from the Macintosh HD/Previous Systems/Previous System 1/Users/mike to my new user’s directory.

Once I got everything in place I was having trouble working with my files on my admin account. I was unable to make changes or rename the recovered files, without giving “Everyone” Read & Write access through the Get Info menu, which obviously wasn’t the solution.

For example when trying to rename a directory; Users/mike/Sites/PSD I would get this Error Message:

Although when I checked the info of the PSD directory, it looked fine (see below):

So OS X was contradicting itself because it was telling me “You Can read and Write” but at the same time telling me “You do not have sufficient access privileges to rename the item “PSD”. I tried a series of things as far as running the Repair Permissions within the Disk Utility, creating a new admin account to try to reset all the permissions enclosed within the Users directory. Nothing was working.

So since the notebook is very new, I still have some free telephone support from Apple so I gave them a call. Spent about an hour on the phone with Tech support and we finally got it working. Here are the steps that we took.

1. Boot your system from the OS X 10.5 install disk. To do this put the install CD into your computer, restart the system while hold the “c” key on your keyboard. This will force a boot from CD.
2. Once you select your language from the Installation wizard, you will notice the menu bar appears at the top of the screen, from here go to Utilities > Password reset.
3. From this screen, select your user account from the combo box. Then without entering a new password, go down towards the button and you will see a “Reset” button that will reset this accounts Privileges and ACL libraries.
4. Once this is done you can Quit the OS X Installation, and reboot your system to your HD. You may need to remove the CD from your machine.
5. once the machine boots, open a Terminal and enter the following two commands, entering your password when prompted. (be sure to replace “Mike” with your own Short Name)
   • sudo chown -R Mike ~
   • sudo chmod -R 755 ~
6. The last steps are simple, open up Macintosh HD/Users then command+click on your Home directory (in my case this was mike) then go to Get Info. In the info screen, Make sure the admin group is in the list, if it’s not then add it with Read & Write Access. Also change everyone in the list to “Read & Write” access temporarily. Then click the tiny Gear icon to and chose “apply to enclosed items” which will apply these permissions to all the files within this directory.
7. Once this is set, go see if you can now make changes to the files. If so then your just about done, you need to only go back into the Get Info screen you were just in for your home directory and change the permission of “Everyone” to Read Only access. Then Apply to enclosed items again.

Hope that works for anyone else having similar insufficient access privileges. After doing a bunch of research on this problem it appears there is quite a bit of issues out there with permissions on OS X Leopard, so if this did not help take a look at these two links:

• Leopard - File permissions | ACLs | User Group Issue
• Administrator privileges gone