I seem to have messed something up!

Zapp Brannigan

On my MBP (running 10.7.1) I was getting along fine until the other day when I went to load MagicPref and got a warning saying "You will not have access to the MagicPRefs preferences, make sure ~/Library/PreferencePanes is writable then restart MagicPrefs"

I'm the only user on the machine so why has this popped up all of a sudden. Also, I think this is related too; now whenever I close Chrome (CMD+Q) it never shuts down properly so any changes I've made to bookmarks or whatever aren't saved and upon reopening Chrome says it failed t shut down correctly.

Anyone know how I can fix this?

Hobbes

Run disk utility and check your permissions. Tends to fix funky things like that. Also a disk check as well probably worth doing if you haven't done it in a while.

Zapp Brannigan

Tried repairing permissions but the problem is still there

One permission did fail to repair though "Warning: SUID file “System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent” has been modified and will not be repaired." SO maybe that's it?

Any ideas?

EDIT: Apparently the above message is something that you can safely ignore.

I did fix the problem I just did a Get Info in my HD and under sharing at the bottom made sure every option (me, system, everyone) had full read & write access. Hopefully that'll be the end of it.

Greentree_uk

Zapp Brannigan wrote: »

I did fix the problem I just did a Get Info in my HD and under sharing at the bottom made sure every option (me, system, everyone) had full read & write access. Hopefully that'll be the end of it.

unfortunately that is the worst thing you could have done. Especially if you propagated those permissions. The only fix after this is to wipe and reinstall. Fingers crossed you didn't propogate

Zapp Brannigan

Greentree_uk wrote: »

unfortunately that is the worst thing you could have done. Especially if you propagated those permissions. The only fix after this is to wipe and reinstall. Fingers crossed you didn't propogate

How is it the worst thing I could've done? And how do I know if I did it?

Greentree_uk

if you clicked on the cog at the bottom of the get info window and then propagated permissions your machine would just crash. Mac OS has a lot of different users in the system for different tasks. changing permissions across a whole drive will break the OS.

Zapp Brannigan

That's what I did and I've had no troubles since.

Should it be immediate?

Greentree_uk

you will probably find the machine will fail after time but most definitely after a restart

Zapp Brannigan

Already restarted it and it was fine. Gonna probably do a fresh install once I get an external HDD to put all my programs and music onto.

Talisman

Your original issue was most likely down to permissions in your user folder being incorrect - unfortunately the Repair permissions functionality of Disk Utility does not always fix such an issue but it can be fixed in the terminal using the chown and chmod commands to make sure your user account has the required access to the files in your home folder hierarchy.

My advice would be to run Disk Utility again and get it to repair the permissions that you have mucked up. You have essentially made every file on the system overwritable so it can easily be corrupted. Had you only made the change to your own user folder you would have most likely resolved your original issue.

Zapp Brannigan

I originally tried just changing my user folder but it didn't fix it.

I've run Disc Utility since and repaired permissions so hopefully I won't have a failing computer anytime soon.

Hobbes

Zapp Brannigan wrote: »

How is it the worst thing I could've done? And how do I know if I did it?

If you set that to go through the whole system, you have effectively opened up your machine to the world if any new app runs.