I think SuperDuper! hosed my permissions. I'll post what I posted to the Apple Discussion Forums (The full thread with replies is over here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....4464#9284464):
So, I just finished setting up a new installation of OS X 10.5.6, and the first thing I noticed was that Macintosh HD was showing up on my desktop with the Time Machine icon, along with my actual external Time Machine drive. So I started investigating what the problem is, and I eventually "solved" it by just pasting the icon file of the proper icon onto the Info Panel of Macintosh HD (although I suspect the cause of the wrong icon might have to do with the following problems). In the process of troubleshooting it, though, I discovered that the permissions for Macintosh HD included a user named "unknown." I had never seen this before, so I started researching it, and I came across this thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread....sageID=8311599. So I did what V.K. suggested, and I came up with similar results to the other user after running "ls -ladeO /", so I ran:
sudo chown root:admin /
sudo chmod 775 /
It seems to have stopped the "unknown" user from showing up, but I have some questions as to whether it is actually fixed:
1) When I ran "ls -ladeO /" it showed group 501 like the user saw in that thread. I never had Tiger installed, which V.K. said is usually what creates that group; the iMac came pre-loaded with Leopard. Why was that group created to begin with, and is the group still present even after running that command? How can I get rid of it completely?
2) After running the "chown" and "chmod" commands, the permissions for Macintosh HD are drwxrwxr-x@. I have another Mac running the same OS in the house, and I checked the permissions on Macintosh HD, and they're drwxrwxr-t. What is the difference, and why is it different?
3) To see if the problem was more widespread, I checked the permissions on a number of random folders, and out of the few I checked, Macintosh HD:Library on the other Mac in the house lists: system - Read & Write
admin - Read & Write
everyone - Read only
For the Mac in question, it's:
system - Read & Write
admin - Read & Write
everyone - Read & Write
This makes me think that permissions on more things than just Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD:Library are screwed up. How can I fix the permissions on Macintosh HD:Library, and is there any way I can just revert all the permissions for all system-created folders on the machine to their proper settings? I know Repair Permissions won't do that. If not, is there a way I can check whether the permissions on any other folders are incorrect, and change them manually? What could have caused all this?
Thanks in advance for everyone's help.
-Jon