HDD Recovery Question

[Natheria]

Ok so, I was asked by a friend of mine to recover some files from his busted mac's hard disk (he got in some sort of scuffle and all but the main drive is toast). I booted up my linux distro to read the HFS formatted disk and as I was looking at his user files to pull them onto my own machine i realized the files were locked (they are under his user account, music, documents, etc). How do i go about getting them onto my own machine/getting access to read these files in general? All i need to do is recover them and i am unsure as to how to give myself permissions in this situation.

[kitamesume]

image the drive? how about your regular backup tools?

[Natheria]

I was unaware that imaging the drive over would get rid of those account permissions. I'm currently in the process of copying the mac drive over to one of my archival drives.

[Freedom Kira]

In Linux, switch your terminal to superuser (I'm only familiar with the command "sudo su" but your distro might use something else) and copy the files using command "cp".

Alternatively, do a "chown" to your user, or just to root if you're in doubt, on all the files.

[Ultra_Magnus]

Yeah, macs are a unix system, so running as root should work.  You could try "sudo nautilus" or "sudo konqueror" if you would rather use a GUI program.

[bork]

If you are copying the files while as root, the file ownership will be under root.  After the files are move to the new location, change ownership (chown), to a normal user or you will not be able to access the files as a user.

chown -R owner /dir/...

[Natheria]

Thanks guys! I finally got around to reading these comments and finish working on it last night (damn midterms). All it needed was a cp with the recursive option set (wouldn't have taken so long if the people i asked before had just mentioned cp in the first place instead of knowing zip about ACLs... oh well, now i know a little bit more).