External harddrive read only

I have an iMac and am running Lion. I have an external harddrive which I've had for months. It's worked fine (uploading files to it and deleting files from it). But suddenly I can't do that. I've checked the Info (which tells me under "Sharing and Permissions", "You can only read"). But there is no place in the Info panel for me to change this.
To my knowledge I did nothing to make this happen. How can I change this so I can once again upload to and delete from my external harddrive?
Regards, Bongani

For what do you use this drive? If it is a data-only drive (e.g., you just use it for iTunes) you can set it to ignore ownership on the volume which I find a lot more convenient than having to mess with permissions.
I use Tiger OS. When I get Info on a drive there is also a "Details" button under the ownership and permissions area where I can adjust things.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2443558
Trouble adding music to iTunes library or importing audio CD - http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1387

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External Harddisk read only after the system hand during I copy some folders to my external drive.

I'm using macbook pro mid 2010.
I could not write my external HDD 1TB (WD) after I copying the folder from local folder to external folder via my parallel desktop.
During the copying, the system hang halfway and no choice i terminate the copy. SInce that, i could not write my HDD either from OSX or via parallel desktop.
When i check the infer, the HDD shown read only. I truing to use the disk utility to verify the disk but I could not click on the button.
Appreciate someone could advice me beside backup and reformat the HDD.
Thank you!

I've got the same problem here with a Seagate external HD. I've been able to install Leopard on another Western Digital HD and boot from it to copy some files to a newly purchased external, but in Leopard I can't copy my 180GB music library because of several errors. It either says that the file names cannot be copied because they are too similar to another file name (accidental dupes in the library) or that the names are too long to be copied and neither make any sense. I'm trying to figure out how to move all of my music over without having to go through it file by file and without losing anything.
I was able to easily copy all other information from the hard drive; the music is the last remaining item I need before I reformat the external and use it in Snow Leopard as a TM backup drive.

FireWire External Drive - Read Only Filesystem

I have a strange issue that I have not been able to resolve. I have an external hard drive connected to my iMac that has a read only file system. I have used it for years without issue. It switched to read only just recently.
Here are the details:
27-inch, Mid 2011 iMac
Processor 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB
Software OS X 10.8.4 (12E55)
The drive in question:
Mount Point : /Volumes/DATA
Capacity : 2 TB (2,000,054,960,128 Bytes)
Format : Mac OS Extended
Available : 450.83 GB (450,826,641,408 Bytes)
Owners Enabled : No
Used : 1.55 TB (1,549,228,318,720 Bytes)
Number of Folders : 15,989
Number of Files : 84,118
As you can see, everything is set to Read & Write. However when I try to remove a file, I get:
$ rm -f test.file
rm: test.file: Read-only file system
If I try to write a file I get:
$ touch test.file
touch: test.file: Read-only file system
I have run the First Aid utilities and everything checks out OK:
The volume DATA appears to be OK.
Rebooting does not fix the issue either. After searching here and the interwebs, I haven't found a solution. Only references to FAT/NTFS formatted drives.
Is there anything else I can do that I missed?

Thank you Linc & MrJavaDeveloper!
I'm not throwing these suggestions out the window, but they would also be exhiiting some other symptoms too. With indexing issues, it shouldn't impact the inode or anything dealing with the filesystem.
The good thing is that the data is all still good and is readable.
First Aid is still the name of the tab in Disk Utility :-)
Regardless, I got impatient and I didn't have a spare drive to copy the data off of it so that I can rebuild this drive. So I nuked it and recreated the partition. Now I have to wait a couple of weeks for my restore from CrashPlan to finish :-P.

External hd read only after snow leopard

Hi, I installed snow leopard and it's running fine, but now my permissions for my external drives (mac formatted) are now read-only. It wont let me change the permission, or change owner, even when I go through root account (regular account is an admin). I already repaired permissions on my mac hd in a vain attempt to see if that would help, but it didn't.
I then tried the chmod command in terminal
sudo chmod -R u+rwX /Volumes/"myexternaldrivename"
but all i get is this for every file on the drive.
chmod: Unable to change file mode on /Volumes/Aaron's Big External/music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Disturbed/Ten Thousand Fists (Bonus Video Version)/Video - Stricken.mp4: Permission denied
Any suggestions?

I've got the same problem here with a Seagate external HD. I've been able to install Leopard on another Western Digital HD and boot from it to copy some files to a newly purchased external, but in Leopard I can't copy my 180GB music library because of several errors. It either says that the file names cannot be copied because they are too similar to another file name (accidental dupes in the library) or that the names are too long to be copied and neither make any sense. I'm trying to figure out how to move all of my music over without having to go through it file by file and without losing anything.
I was able to easily copy all other information from the hard drive; the music is the last remaining item I need before I reformat the external and use it in Snow Leopard as a TM backup drive.

External Storage - Read only

Hey all,
I am a Mac newbie and I connected two external storage devices - one via USB and another through Firewire (though I personally do not think this matters, right?)
The one via USB works fine; however, the other storage shows under permissions as "Read only".
Any advice on how I could change the settings?
Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Mustan

Painful yes, but not impossible!
Sence your Mac can read that format you can move your Photo's, Music and most of your other files to the Mac. Besure to test anything you move to the Mac befor reformatting the HD.
The other option is backup to the PC and then network you files to the Mac from the windows PC.
Sharing files between a Windows XP PC and a Mac running OS 10.4.x
If you are going to use the Ext. HD in both worlds have a look at this article:
Sharing drives
Dennis

Time Machine Turns External Drive Read Only

Folks--
I went away on vacation in December 2010 and shut my mac osx 10.5.8 desktop computer off, and with it my lacie 1T external drive, partitioned into three volumes, one of which served as my Time Machine backup volume. When I returned from vacation in early January 2011, Time Machine said that the volume in question was no longer available. Somehow it had become "read only." When I tried to fix it using Disk Utility I was unable to even verify it. When I tried to copy the files from the volume to another drive so that I could reformat, I received error message 1426. I'm feeling a little stuck. It seems like the only option is to reformat the entire drive and lose all of the back ups (the other two volumes have older backups).
Any suggestions?
Thanks.

nicx wrote:
Is it really corrupted? I can still access all the data on the volume, I just can't copy it or get the volume out of the read-only status.
Yes. If OSX marked it "read-only," it's corrupted.
Time Machine backups are intricately linked together; anything corrupted means the whole set is suspect. You may be able to restore some things, you might even be able to do a full system restore from some backups; but somewhere, something is corrupted. OSX knows that, and won't let you resume backing-up to corrupted backups, or copy them (even if you could copy them, the copy would be corrupted, too).

External drive - READ ONLY

What's with the hard drives customers buy from the apple stores?
I have had this hard drive for a few weeks now and after reformatting the drive 5 times and coped a few items to the drive a few days latter it says read only you cant copy to this drive WHAT THE F#%$
Please help with this on going FULT with apple and its products..
(using a iMac with a Porsche design)

Use the Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder to reformat it to MS-DOS if you need to use it with a PC, or Mac OS Extended otherwise; if for some reason you don't want to or can't erase the drive, install Paragon NTFS or MacFUSE onto Mac OS X.
(27993)

External Volume read only on Mac OS X server 10.5

My mac OS X Server 10.5.8 is having a FC volume is read only ,
What could br the issue ??

Same issue here. I even tried to import the cert directly into keychain. I did get the certificate to show up in server admin with the correct signed info, but when I assigned a service to the cert. It actually was handing out the old unsigned cert, so I removed it to try again. Now I cannot get the cert back in server admin at all, just in Keychain under SYSTEM. The self-signed certs only show up under My Keychains... It appears also that Server Admin will only see the certs that are located in MyKeychains. Anyone have any luck?

Automatic make external hdds read-only

I want to reach, that every Storage-Device, which gets connected to the computer, is automatically read-only.
In Windows Server 2008 there was an registry hack (StorageDevicePolicies -> WriteProtect) , but in Windows Server 2012 this doesnt work any more.
So what is a suitable alternative?
PS: Not only users must not write on the hard drive, also windows self should not change the Data on the hdd.
Thank you

Hi,
You may need a third party tool like forensic disk controller to achieve your goal:
Forensic disk controller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_disk_controller
Please Note: The third-party products discussed here are manufactured by companies that are independent of Microsoft. We make no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding these products' performance or reliability.
Best Regards,
Amy

External harddrive reads on only 1 USB

Hey everyone, i have recently taken harddrive out of ps3 and formated as i have done before. I have it in external case and all that. Anyways, the harddrive now reads and writes fine on the USB on the right side of my mac, but not the USB on the left side..? Yet my other harddrive works on both, so it cant be the usb drive. any suggestions?
Thanks

The USB specification calls for all powered USB ports to be able to supply at 500mA. I know that some 2.5" USB HDD cages have a goofy (and non-compliant, IIRC) cable with the computer side having two USBA connectors; one for power and data and another for additional power.
I had my MBP (3,1) in for service to repair an optical drive that wasn't burning. I had them look at the USB ports for the same issue as the OP. Left port will power USB keychain drives and mice (and other low-power devices) but not SSD or portable HDD drives. Right port is fine, works with everything. Both ports worked fine for a while.
They claimed that they couldn't reproduce the problem but explained that the earlier MBP (3,1 and newer, maybe?) had this "feature" and it was related to the fact that one of the ports will still provide power in sleep mode. I have no idea how that works out logically but that's what they said.
I picked up my MBP and spoke to a customer service rep on iPhone4 launch day so they were a little busy and the actual "Genius" that worked on my laptop wasn't available for me to talk to or demonstrate the issue for.
Honestly, I'm not sure if I believe them but I am sure that I have little additional time to mess around with it.
Message was edited by: jkositarut - didn't realize that the vernacular term for post-digestive gas emission was taboo.
Message was edited by: jkositarut

External drives read only problem

iam a new mac user. i have 2 external drives formatted to ntfs that can only read. They are too large to transfer files to the mac to reformat to fat32. Any workaround suggestions?

yopadima wrote:
iam a new mac user. i have 2 external drives formatted to ntfs that can only read. They are too large to transfer files to the mac to reformat to fat32. Any workaround suggestions?
You can install NTFS3G, this will allow you to write to an NTFS drive

Won't read external harddrive

I have a verbatim external harddrive. after only 3 months, it's already broke and my mac can't read the harddrive. this is a long shot but does anyone have any ideas. i find it hard to believe that this thing is broke after only 3 months.

You didn't say what model mac you have. First reset the PRAM:
1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.
Then, if you have a Powerbook or iBook, you can reset the PMU, or, if an Intel-based system, do an SMC reset.
If those actions don't fix it, then take advantage of the warranty to replace the external drive with the faulty electronics.

My external harddrive has switched to read only

i have a western digital 1 tb hard drive which is formated to fat 32.
everything was going perfect on it until one day i was copying the whole drive to an older hard drive to create a back up when it came to my attention that my current external harddrive had become read only.
it made no sense.

Select the drive on your Desktop and then Get Info (command+i) In the window that opens, down at the bottom, are the permissions.
Click the small padlock icon and enter your admin password then change the Privilege to Read & Write, if you're asked to apply the same setting to sub-folder say yes. When that's done close the window.

HT4796 why are all the files on my external harddrive showing as read only?

I have a harddrive (Seagate) that I have used with my PC to store files. When I plug it into my Mac, all the files are read only. How do I fix that?

Most likely, the drive is formatted NTFS, which OS X can only read natively.
If you don't want to reformat the disk into something you can use on both, try exFAT.
If you want to reformat it only for a Mac, use Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Either way you'd have to move the files off the drive, format, then reload them
There are several programs which will allow you to write to NTFS, Paragon, Tuxera, and NTFS-3G (free).

External harddrive limited to 'read only'

I have a hard drive that is set to 'read only' and is formatted as NTFS. How can I change this so that I can save files to the disk, without reformattin and losing everything on the drive?

Best is to connect that external to a Windows PC, Copy all the files off it then format it either FAT32 or exFAT on the Windows PC. That way both Windows and OS X can write and read from it.
3rd party software will work but can be problematic.

External harddrive read only

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