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Whenever I save a Pages (or other) document I'm greeted with this warning.

The document is on a volume that does not support permanent version storage

I really like the version feature and this warning basically says that it is disabled. Any ideas why my hard drive isn't supported? The machine is a mid 2010 13" MacBook Pro with a 1TB internal drive. The drive is formatted as HFS+ Journaled.

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  • 1
    Is the drive formatted as NTFS or FAT32, by any chance?
    – Phil M
    Aug 11, 2011 at 17:07
  • 1
    Can you provide more info on what type of partition your hard drive is running? (either using Disk Utility, or highlighting your Mac drive and right click Get Info) Aug 11, 2011 at 17:08
  • I updated the description with the drive format (HFS+ Journaled).
    – Nate Bird
    Aug 11, 2011 at 17:21
  • Case sensitivity? Mount point? Permissions verified?
    – Gio
    Aug 11, 2011 at 18:26
  • This is the default Snow Leopard install preferences for Mac OS X. Permissions were repaired, the drive has no errors.
    – Nate Bird
    Aug 29, 2011 at 12:02

3 Answers 3

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I ended up wiping the drive and just installing Lion from scratch. That seems to have fixed the issue.

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The problem is that while the drive was originally formatted as HFS+, it was most likely NOT set up with the GUID Partition Table, which is required by Intel Macs if you want the disk to be a boot volume. Yours was probably originally set up with the older APT (Apple Partition Table) which was the standard for PowerPC Macs.

An Intel Mac can read and write files to an APT - HFS+ hard drive, but it cannot boot from one.

When you reformatted the drive with Disk Utility, it used GUID by default.

I know that Disk Utility can change one to the other, but I'm not sure if it can do so without reformatting the disk first. So your reformat did the job, but now you know exactly why.

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    This MacBook is only about 14 months old and the hard drive was replaced in January with a 1TB drive. It was partitioned with the GUID partition table.
    – Nate Bird
    Sep 20, 2011 at 13:37
  • Well then I'm wrong. And I'm really surprised.
    – user9290
    Sep 21, 2011 at 0:32
  • Yeah. I really don't know what was wrong. It wasn't worth anymore time so I backed it up. Wiped it nice and clean. Repartitioned and reinstalled Lion clean. That fixed the problem but it was a lot of work to get there. Thanks for the help though!
    – Nate Bird
    Sep 21, 2011 at 16:40
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There is some information at the bottom of this post that details problems with versioning. My first recommendation would be to repair permissions, and if that doesn't work, try the following commands (make a backup first because I'm making this up on the fly):

mkdir /.DocumentRevisions-V100
chown root:wheel /.DocumentRevisions-100
chmod 111 /.DocumentRevisions-100

What those commands do is to make the directory that Lion is supposed to create to store its versions, change the owner and group, and then change the permissions as per the post linked above.

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  • Thanks for the suggestion. However, the DocumentRevisions-100 folder already existed and had the correct permissions and owners.
    – Nate Bird
    Aug 29, 2011 at 12:05

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