The three frog hearts, blood a virgin and the Swahili chant worked.

12.04 is an LTS anyway isn't it? It's good til April 2017 for patches/updates.

Also if you upgrade from an existing version, it doesn't replace your desktop does it?

I dunno what's wrong with CDE.. You crazy kids and your new fangled GUIs.

That said real men don't GUI I'm involved in designing and building an "internal cloud" infrastructure at work - massive systems, massive virtualisation (SPARC based), heaps of custom shit. I've figured out how to do everything Oracle VM Manager can do via the command line and the API. I'm too lazy for button clicking, I type too fast

Yeah, it's an LTS and instead of a full on install I let it do the upgrade path version so I retained all my Thunderbird N Firefox stuff and 'most" of my applications I had installed.

However, my previous statements about all my permissions being returned were a bit premature. While the directories now all my my rights, many folders and files are still locked even after applying the usual fixes, Grrrr!

Runnin all command line is waaaay above my pay grade, especially since I never learned to type. I just look at all the coding in the stuff I C&P when necessary and wonder WTF that stuff means

Maybe this could help

[www.thegeekstuff.com]

I'd have given the chant in Aramaic, Sanskrit or Tibetan but couldn't find a proper translation of "Work, you bastard!" into any of them.

Thanks blah, looks like some interesting diagnostic homework to undertake. Was talkin to a buddy of my B-in-laws last night who works as a Unix/Linux corporate geek,primarily in the security end of things, who offered some other avenues to look into as well.

One interesting byproduct of all such issues is I get to learn new stuff along the way, which is a good thing

It's good to learn. I'm not a Linux guru but have some schooling with it and tons of experiences with a lot of different OSes and hardware types. I suspect file system corruption, like corrupted inodes. If so fsck should determine and hopefully be able to fix it. Just make sure to never force fsck on a mounted drive. That's one of those things that just because it's possible doesn't mean you should ever do it.

Depends on how much you like your file system. Sometimes it's fun especially on your root partition

Weirdo.

Root my filesystem baby

My coffee mug once read...
anything you say gets piped to /dev/null

Unix is sexy: who | grep -i blonde | date; cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep

Me: Make me a sandwich.
Kim: What? Make it yourself you fat fuck.
Me: sudo make me a sandwich
Kim: OK

Come one baby, f my disk.

Did anything work yet Kim?

Linux is garbage

Garbage is rubbish

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

There are problems with every computer OS. That is the nature of computer operating systems, they are never going to be perfect. Switching OSes is trading one set of issues for another set.

Meh, nah, nothin's worked so far, still the same jacked up file system

That's too bad. I'm hoping you have the files backed up from the drive or can still access it slaved to another computer and can get the files. I think you said you could. Have you tested the drive for bad sectors? I think fsck can do that but I don't know what you have actually tried.

Yeah, fsck tested for bad sectors as part of the process and found some on one HD but nothin major. I already knew that drive had issues as Disc Utility showed the same info.

Everything's backed up onto other drives but the back ups have the same permissions issues So that's not very helpful

Whenever someone file or folder permission'd thins on old Windoze machines, I just booted to a Linux Red-Hat installer and that gave me access to the entire file system. So you could boot to a new OS like Fedora? as if you were going to do an install and see what access it allows you to the existing file system. Pulse would know some snazzier ways, perhaps even "virtual" ways of doing this.

I think he's already done the equivalent of that `Berto. How about going the opposite direction and try copying to an NTFS drive? That would strip the Linux permissions from the files. Then run chkdsk /f from Windoze to clean up security descriptors and then copy the files to a clean ext3-fs drive.

I haddn tried doin it with a Live CD but I installed my back up HDs in another machine and did a fresh install of CentOS hoping the new OS would take possession of the files yet this was even worse. All directories and files on that system are totally inaccessible now, which again, really makes no sense at all.

I suppose I could do some jiggery pokering with the NTFS idea. That would def take a buttload of time to accomplish though with just under 12TBs of data transfer to undertake.

A smaller scaled test would be in order 1st before even tryin it on a complete drive, though I think my smallest individual directory is still at least 300GBs.

I s'pose a cuppla hours of test time really iddn all that much compared to hammerin away manually at the ol keeboard changin the permissions though

have you tried unplugging it and then plugging it back in?

Just for you PJ ...... Reach out, reach out and touch someone .... SMACK

Nah, forget my idea. Standard 32-bit MBR has a 2TB limit. I forgot you were dealing with that much data.

perhaps you just need moar ram?