Get Control of Your Macintosh HD Back

(This is my first post, so we’re going to keep things simple. Later posts will get into more gory under-the-hood Mac hacks & scripts.)

Once you upgrade to Lion, you’ll find you can no longer save files to the root of your “Macintosh HD.” This is an attempt by Apple to keep your filesystem clean and force you to save your files in your Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies, or other appropriate locations.

But if you’re a control freak as I am, you want to save files where you like; it’s your computer, darn it! Besides, many of us upgraders will have legacy files saved at the root of our HD’s that we suddenly won’t be able to save changes to after installing Apple’s latest cat.

So here’s the easy trick to regain control of your Macintosh HD. In Terminal, enter:

 sudo chmod 777 "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"

If you ever want to put it back the way Apple had it, enter:

 sudo chmod 755 "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"

There you have it. Save away!