Permissions looking for unknown user I have a problem on a external drive which permissions are looking for an unknown user. In the permission list it says "loading..."(or similar word, not on an english machine) in the user field.

How can I find out what user it's looking for? Is there anything I can do in the terminal?
If you browse to one of the external disks' folders in the Terminal, typing ls -l will show you the owner and group as the third and fourth columns.

If these are just numeric IDs, your system doesn't know who the owning user is, and is printing a raw UID/GID instead.