Chosen Solution
I bought a replacement SSD (pre-owned). When I power up, it would only go to recovery drive. Name of the drive was “osx 10.. (clone)” it was encrypted (el capitan). So I erased it and installed Sierra. It keeps telling me I don’t have permission. Come to find out It has a VM 2 GB partition, Recovery 700-800 MB. In Disk Utilities when I go to info on the main drive owner enabled says yes, on VM says no, on (my) Untitled says no. how do I change at least the untitled to yes? Is there a way in terminal or single user mode to give myself permission?
The VM volume is the systems BIOS image (EFI). So if someone enabled hardware locking on their system the image copy will have it enabled. So if you placed the SSD in your system the SSD is locked with their user ID. So to fix this you need to completely erase the SSD. You’ll need to either setup your system in Target mode with a second Mac or you’ll need an OWC external drive case to hold your new SSD so you can use Disk Utility to fully wipe it clean. Then redo the drive. One last point here is the OS version you use as High Sierra now uses a different format (APFS) on SSD’s which could also be a factor here as well.
