Hello, Disk Utility. You’re usually a great tool. Not today. All I wanted to do was Verify Disk Permissions and you would immediately spit back at me:
Error detected while verifying/repairing permissions on disk4s2 Server HD: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)
There were no physical disk errors reported and I just had a gut feeling that there was something else going on.
Turns out, there was. /Library/Receipts. This directory is incredibly hard to find documentation on, which is why I’m writing about it here.
The problem:
Permissions for the entire Disk Utility receipts directory structure was wrong causing it to error immediately upon check.
ls -l /Library/Receipts
drwxr-xr-x 31 axl admin 1054 Nov 23 13:41 boms
drwxr-xr-x 3 axl admin 102 Jan 12 16:50 db
The fix:
Recursively give the boms & db folders the right permissions.
chown -R _installer:wheel /Library/Receipts/boms
chown -R _installer:admin /Library/Receipts/dbls -l /Library/Receipts
drwxr-xr-x 31 _installer wheel 1054 Nov 23 13:41 boms
drwxr-xr-x 3 _installer admin 102 Jan 13 10:46 db
thank you thank you – this error was causing me so much grief, and i was just about to go through a time consuming re-install of everything
Darn, no luck for me with this. Where did you find out about that directory, or how did you know it was the cause of that error in Disk Utility?
Nathan, there is a more common cause for this error that requires you to run fsck manually at the command line: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1901. My problem was that was the solution wasn’t fixing the error. Someone had a knowledge base article somewhere detailing what exactly is being done behind the scenes with Receipts and it made me wonder about permissions. Ultimately with some comparisons, I found that to be the problem.
Thanks, Jason. This helped me tremendously today. Unfortunately, I already re-installed the OS on a client 10.5 Mac before finding your post. Worked like a charm!