Error on startup

[halfworld]

That's the kind of thing that can crop up when Animator can't find it's own folder on your computer... Not to worry, I've seen this error pop up before: What is your hard drive name?

Make sure it doesn't have any 'illegal' characters in it (™@£ etc.) as these seem to work unreliably.

Ian

[vislaw]

Thanks Ian,

I've been meaning to say to you how much I appreciate your presence here (and on the home site board). It means a lot to me that you and some of the other devoted experienced users are willing to put time in helping others.

I'm running a brand new 8-core and didn't change any drive names at all. However, I installed bootcamp and have moved a bunch of files from a second drive I added. I'll try de-installing again and will rename my drives appropriately and then see if the install works.

Mark

[halfworld]

Hi Mark,

No problem at all, I enjoy it ;)

Other things to try

• Copy the EIAS folder to another hard drive, does it work there?
• Copy the EIAS folder to your desktop, does it work there?
• Fix permissions
• Stand upside down and dip your head in a bucket of cold tea (I find this solves most EIAS problems).

When beta testing 6.6 this problem affected both myself and another tester, in both cases it turned out to be illegal characters in the file path to EIAS.

Ian

[vislaw]

Interestingly, I added a drive from an older G5 that had 6.5 installed. When I double-clicked it I got the code authorization dialog and when I put in my dongle code it also generated the same error. Thus, it seems clear the problem is certainly not with the software per se.

With regard to permissions, that's an arcane area that I'm not familiar with under OSX. I note that my windows drives are read-only because I don't have permission to write. It used to be simple under the older Mac user/groups control panel to change permissions for folders/drives. I gather things are less simple now. Do I need to learn Unix commands to change my drive permissions?

[halfworld]

Nah, nothing so complex,

To repair permissions:

Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility
Select a drive and click the "Repair disk permissions" button, run it twice.

You can also try this

Get info on your EIAS folder
Open the Ownership & Permissions triangle
Make sure it is set to Read and Write
Make sure this is the case for all the folders in the EIAS folder

If it still gives you trouble then I'm online on MSN and iChat (my user profile has the handles) if you'd like some live help.

Good luck!
Ian

[WmH]

Interestingly, I added a drive from an older G5 that had 6.5 installed. When I double-clicked it I got the code authorization dialog and when I put in my dongle code it also generated the same error. Thus, it seems clear the problem is certainly not with the software per se.

With regard to permissions, that's an arcane area that I'm not familiar with under OSX. I note that my windows drives are read-only because I don't have permission to write. It used to be simple under the older Mac user/groups control panel to change permissions for folders/drives. I gather things are less simple now. Do I need to learn Unix commands to change my drive permissions?

Are your windows drives formatted NTFS? If so OS X automatically sets those drives R/O (read only) as NTFS is a proprietary (and secret) MS format that has been reverse engineered (by the open source community) therefore writing to a NTFS drive might create problems (and apple is unwilling to set the default to allow this). Format windows drives you want to access with OS X with FAT rather then (the default on XP) NTFS. Then OSX will happily read and write to your windows volumes (by default).

As for manually setting permissions simply select what you want to change (file or folder) and select get info from the file menu (or hit cmd-i) to bring up the info window. At the bottom of the info window you will see (flip down the details arrow) and can edit ownership and permission info.

What Ian is talking about is resetting system permissions, this "fix permissions" resets the permissions on (apple) system and resource files to the default (correct) state. As the system does not know what the permissions should be for any third party application resources it cannot alter (correct) those (only OS X system files/directories will (can) be reset by this procedure)

[vislaw]

WMH: Most appreciated! I try to keep my Windows drives FAT32 for the very reason that I have long worked cross platform and have shared drives between both systems. Interestingly, although I can see the Windows drives when in OSX (read-only, though) I can't see the Mac drive when running XP even though I have MacOpener installed. I am suspecting I need to update my copy of MacOpener although it isn't a big deal since I really only need to have a couple data drives visible from both operating systems.

That is very good info regarding permissions with FAT32 drives.

Thanks again.

Mark

[vislaw]

When I open the info for my Windows drives at the bottom of the window where I find "Ownership and Permissions" it says "You can only read" and I am not able to change it. I can see all my files, can copy them to my Mac drive but I cannot write anything to the Windows drive. Any help on how I change these Windows drives (FAT32) to be able to write?

[WmH]

When I open the info for my Windows drives at the bottom of the window where I find "Ownership and Permissions" it says "You can only read" and I am not able to change it. I can see all my files, can copy them to my Mac drive but I cannot write anything to the Windows drive. Any help on how I change these Windows drives (FAT32) to be able to write?

Sorry about the delay, been busy....
Don't know why it would come up R/O, when I get a chance I will look on an intel/imac we have set up with w2K under parallels and see how the drive comes up, I thought it was R/W...
Using the file info box, you would need to be the owner of the file/directory to change from R/O to R/W (click the lock and enter the system pass to enable owner change)
You can also also set ownership and permissions using chown and chmod (arcane unix CL;-) or get one of the nice free-ware GUI applications that make it easy;
BatChmod
http://macchampion.com/arbysoft/
Chop
http://www.zenonez.com/chop/index.html

One caution, I personally would never make an OS X root volume R/W from windows (IMHO Windows security is poor, despite the $pin (and stunts) you hear about it being equivalent to *NIX) When you install the drivers necessary for win to access OS X (root particularly) volumes you open them to a whole host of possible corruption vectors.

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