Backup drive now read-only after upgrafe to 10.5.2

Cannot change permissions (as root or as myself) on external drive. Any ideas? No problems before OS upgrade

In this forum
http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=42725&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=0
they tell that Dell released A101 in 9/10/2007
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&re leaseid=R166212&SystemID=XPS_M1330&servicetag=HXW2FD1&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=159 81&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=1&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=32&fileid=224 422
In the same forum in this post
http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=42502
there is a link for a firmware called "GSA-S10N - Firmware AP12 (APPLE)" (I read that a MBP user had a laptop from Apple with that firmware) and direct download link is
http://forum.rpc1.org/dlfile.php?site=firmx&file=GSA-S10N_AP12Apple.zip
Who is brave to try an upgrade? :-D

Similar Messages

External drive now Read Only? Can't change after Lion installed.

I have several extenal drives attached. One has two partitions. One of the partitions is used as a SuperDuper Backup drive. SuperDuper couldln't find it now that I upgraded to Lion. I found that all my drives were changed to "Read Only" after the Lion update. I changed them back to "Read/Write" without a problem expect for the SD partition. It doesn't let me change from Read Only. Any ideas on correcting this? Thanks.

Select that partition. Press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window. At the bottom see if there is a checkbox labeled, "Ignore permissions on this volume." If the box is checked then first uncheck the box. Open the Terminal application in the Utilities folder. Enter the following at the prompt:
sudo chown root:admin
Place a space after "admin" then drag the Desktop icon of the partition into the Terminal window. Press RETURN. Enter your admin password when prompted (it will not be echoed) and press RETURN again.

NTFS External Hard Drive now read only

Hello Everyone,
For months I have been connecting a NTFS 1 TB Phantom Labs external hard drive to my mac book, to access my music collection, as well as store additional large files. Today, however, I found my external hard drive to be "read only," rather than read and write. Interestingly, the folder where I keep my music, also includes the lock image as the external hard drive icon.
When I look in Disk Utility, the Phantom Drive is originally listed as read/write. However, the mounting point, named disk2s1 is listed as read only.
Does anyone have any idea how to resolve this situation and return to the read/write status I originally enjoyed?
Thanks.

I have got the exact same problem!!
have a 320 seagate ext HD formatted as NTFS that I have been using for the last 3-4 months that suddenly became read only.
I'm running macfuse with 3G to read and write to the drive and prior to this have never had an issue.
Have another ext HD formatted as NTFS that reads and writes fine. I have tried disk utility but verify and first aid are greyed out for the seagate drive, One minute I was writing to my drive fine and next time I plugged it in Read only (yes I ejected properly as always)
Any ideas?? I hope it's not a re format and start again..

Copied files from external drive, now "read only" on Mac HDD

I recently moved a large amount of files from my old PC to my new Mac. I copied the files from WinXP to a USB hard drive, then connected the drive to my Mac. After I copied all the files to the Mac I noticed that the majority of them are set with permissions that say "You can only read this file". How do I take ownership of these files so I can delete/rename some of them?
Thanks!

Select your file and open the information panel. By owner and access, change the permission.

Seagate Backup Plus Suddenly Read Only After Working Fine

So I bit on a good deal on a Seagate external drive for backup. I set it up to run with Time Machine and it worked fine for months. Then, suddenly, Time Machine could no longer write to the drive. I can still read and recover old backups but I cannot write to the drive or change my rights. I have updated the firmware on the drive. No help. Disk repair fails and my Mac tells me to format the drive and start over.
However, I don't consider that a solution.
Any other thoughts? I see a lot of other issues out there including for NTFS formatting but I am using Mac formatting.

More often it isn't the drive as much as the drive enclosures.
The combination of USB2 and TimeMachine also have contributed with problems. Also more common when using 'green' drives that have their own parking, going to sleep, reducing power and putting drive into standby and then taking longer to be online. Last item that caused users trouble were the bus-powered, like WD Passport drives that do not have their own power supply and depend on USB bus (USB3 is better).
Even WD drive cases have had trouble and problems, but not the actual drive. The corruption is in large part due to how and what happens with Mac HFS+ when a drive is not properly "safely" ejected.
I would be careful with name brand enclosures. Some WD enclosures built the case into and around the drive, the drives are not removable... at all.
You might want to source a drive case on Amazon or elsewhere or OWC www.macsales.com which do allow swapping out drives.

Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"

Here's my story:
On Sunday I upgraded my relatively new MacBook Pro (meaning, I haven't had it long enough to install any wonky third party applications) from 10.4 to Leopard. TM was one of my primary motivators for the upgrade. I plugged my brand new 500GB MyBook external FW drive in to my older 400GB MyBook FW drive, and plugged that into the laptop. I'd had the older drive formatted for Mac by the eBay seller and use it to store movies and such. I got the 500 off the shelf at Costco.
My internal hard drive name has a space in it, but in file sharing the computer name does not have any non alpha characters.
I launched TM and pointed it to the new drive as the backup location. It said the drive had to be formatted. I was not surprised. I told it to go ahead.
It finished in a reasonable amount of time, naming the drive "Time Machine Backup" (or something similar, with spaces in the name) and started making the initial backup. I proceded to play a couple hours of World of Warcraft (but that's another forum while it worked. It was still going when I called it a night, but it was making progress backing up about 100GB.
In the morning it was done. No error messages. I accessed the freaky stargate display and saw tons of backed up files and applications. Good so far. I shut the computer down and headed for work where I'm forced to use an HP and Windows.
After booting up last night TM displayed a message (I'm paraphrasing here since I'm at work now): "Backup Failed -- backup disc is read only."
Huh?
I did "Get Info" on the disc and it says I have read/write access. Guests have read only. I was not able to change these permissions (the Get Info window is locked).
I brought up Disc Utility thinking to fix permissions. I can only fix permissions on the internal drive, this option is greyed out for both externals. I verified permissions on the main drive, just to be safe. No issues found.
I changed the FW daisy chain, putting the 500GB drive first so it's directly connected to the computer. No luck, didn't really expect it.
I dragged a file from the main drive over to the backup drive. It copied. I trashed it from the backup drive. It trashed. Definitely read/write.
Key Questions:
Obviously I can read and write to the drive, so why can't TM?
What do I do to fix it?
Secondary Questions:
The system offered to format the drive and I let it. If drive format is the problem here (which seems to be the case with others having problems), why the heck wouldn't the system format it correctly?
If spaces in the drive name are a problem (perhaps they aren't), why would it use a name that has them?

Okay everyone, I think I have found the solution, especially if you are seeing the "Unknown" user in your Get Info window's Sharing & Permissions setting for your external drive.
I had written earlier about my work-around for getting my drobo to work right after getting the "read-only" error from Time Machine. But unfortunately it was a temporary and temperamental fix. There were times then I had to eject the disk and launch Disk Utility to run a repair on the disk which would take more than half an hour on my drobo. But all the while my permissions had this "Unknown" user. Well I decided to "Go UNIX" and see if I could fix this problem once and for all.
I opened up Terminal and typed "*ls -la /Volumes*". This gives me a directory listing of my mounted drive volumes. I noticed that all of my drives, internal, external, USB and FireWire, all had "root" as the user and "admin" as the group, _EXCEPT for my drobo!_ So I forced it to conform by changing it manually by typing "*sudo chown root:admin /Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/*".
sudo = temporarily enables root mode by asking for your password before executing.
chown = changes ownership to...
root:admin = "root" is the user and "admin" is the group.
*/Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/* = My drobo drive is named "*Drobo Backup HD*", but UNIX sees spaces as command separators, so you have to use the "\ " to signify spaces within a name.
After doing this over a week ago, _I have not had any other problems_ with using my drobo as a backup drive. It has never come up with the "read-only" error in Time Machine, the Sharing & Permissions setting do not have any "Unknown" users or groups, I don't even need to wait for my drobo before logging in like I did in the past. I just boot my Mac and everything with my drobo and Time Machine just works... No problems!
For me, this seems to be permanently fixed!
But please let me and the rest of us know if you try this solution, and if it works for you.

Error says my External backup hard drive is read only

I have a WD External drive that I use for my Time Machine backup. I turned on the computer today and it says it cannot backup because the drive is read only. It appears on the desktop and in the Finder window. When I open Time Machine preferences, it's identified as the backup disk. But when I choose "backup now", I get that message (it's read only).
Do I have to partition this again using Disk Utility or is there a simpler solution? Thank you,

See #C6 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).

External drive goes read only with error -50 after time

Running the special release of 10.8.2 for Mac Mini (2012) that was recently released. I have two external USB drives. The first contains my iTunes collection and the second is my time machine backup disk. The iTunes drive seems to go read only after it's been mounted awhile. I can read files off the drive, but I can't make any changes. I can't delete files nor edit them.
If I try to do anything with the disk including a repair permissions or disk on it, I get an error -50. The only way to get out of this state is to unmount the drive and remount it forcibly or reboot.
Anyone have ideas on what is going on or experienced a similar issue?

I did a little more research and there are quite a few people who've seen this error. I don't think it's the drive.
I suspect the controller in the enclosure, a jmicron 0x2336, is responsible for my problems. It looks like Linux and FreeBSD both had software updates to work around bugs in the controller. If OS X did not get updated, it would explain everything. The drive sleeps and then won't wake up fully and OS X marks it as in error and goes read only.
The enclosure is a Thermaltake Silver II USB + esata. It looks like a lot of people have had similar problems with them. I saw posts on macrumors, adobe's support forums, etc.

After moving iTunes, external drive sometimes becomes read-only after reboot

I had some system corruption a few weeks ago, and had to restore my system. As part of that prolonged effort, I decided to move my iPhoto Library and iTunes Library to external FW800 drives.
I had terrible problems initially with these drives mounting read-only. I found a relatively quick work-around, and that seemed to fix the problem. But I still have them periodically mount read-only, and I can't D/L iTunes updates, etc.
Why do they keep doing this on a reboot? Very frustrating, as I need to reboot as part of the fix, and I'm always in the middle of something else, and can't reboot at that time.

Oh, as part of this, not sure when the change was made, OSX used to keep the mounted volume name in /Volumes, even if the volume was ejected. Would cause an occasional problem - but very rare. I notice now that ML seems to create/delete these mountpoints automagically - and that's part of the problem. They get incorrect permissions when the volume mounts, and I (user I'm logged in as), can't write to the volume without some background shenanigans.
My process is this:
Unmount problem volume
Drop to terminal, and "sudo mkdir /Volumes/<mounted_volume_name>"
Remount volume via Disk Utility (you now get a "<mounted_volume_name> 1" - with CORRECT permissions)
Unmount the volume again
Remove the created directory (i.e. undo step 2)
Remount the volume - 99.9% of the time that seems to fix it.
Reboot to be sure - and it stays for a while - then at some point becomes a problem again.
Not sure if it's something in ML that's an issue - or something in iTunes or iPhoto (but can't see how they would affect the permissions when the system reboots and you login)

TS1550 OSX Upgrade (Mountain Lion) turned external drive to "read-only" and now I can not do back-ups on time machine. How do I fix this?

I recently upgraded to mountain lion, latest version OS and now my external drives are read-only. They are formatted Mac OS Extended and I have been using one of them for Time Machine. How do I fix?
Thanks

http://pondini.org/TM/C6.html

Hi all not sure where original request went but as a new apple user I have external hard drives that are now "read only" and I can't change or save documents. Went to Get Info and this did not help. Can anyone assist with solution, thanks.

I am a new user to apple and have external hard drives from previous computers. I have many documents I can no longer access and change as they say the drives are read only. How do I change the read only to read and write etc for these external drives. I tried Get Info but this did not assist. Thanks.

Hi,
Google is your Friend
10:18 PM Sunday; February 12, 2012
 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Lion 10.7.3)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

External Hard Drive Becomes Read Only

I have a LaCie Hard Drive that Time Machine has been backing up to for about 4 days now. All of a sudden, the external hard drive is read only. When I go into Get Info for the hard drive, I can't even change the read/write permissions - it's all grayed out. This is the second time it's happened. The first time was on a Western Digital MyBook. TM fried that drive. At least this drive hasn't disappeared like the last time.
I've now changed the Time Machine backup to my second hard drive on my Mac Pro (which is screaming along, as opposed to the FW800 [!!] backup on my La Cie, whose file transfers are slo-o-o-w).
The idea behind backing up onto the external was so that if I ever needed to leave during a fire or earthquake, I could bring this with me and not worry if my computer was destroyed. Insurance would replace the computer, and I could replace my system.
If it weren't formatted properly, it wouldn't have been backing up for the last few days.
Can anyone help?
Message was edited by: Theresa Mesa

Thank you to everyone who has posted about this issue -- it just happened to me AGAIN this morning (this is my 3rd time), after I installed the 10.5.2 update. The first two times were right after I hooked up my external Iomega 500GB drive to use with Time Machine and I thought it was something I was doing. Then it seemed to work fine for a couple months so I thought the problem was over. Guess not! It is frustrating because I just lost about 2 months worth of backups. So finally I searched Apple's discussion forums and saw that I am not alone. However, no one was really posting a solution other than to say "reformat the drive".
So I did a Google search about this topic and encountered the following article. I have just gone through the steps he outlines and although I won't know for awhile if it works, I figure at this point it can't hurt to try. I hope this proves useful to others as well. (One note -- in his article, he says to skip the Erase tab and go right to the Partition tab. If you don't see the Partition tab, first erase your corrupt Time Machine backup disk and then follow his steps.)
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/leopard-disk-utility-format-issue-screws-with-t ime-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php
Cheers ~
Message was edited by: sneebish

Time Capsule backup failed, volume read-only, can't delete

I've only been using Time Machine and Time Capsule for 2 months. This week it stopped working. First error message:
"Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume."
Checking the Time Machine preferences, "Last backup" would read "backup failed"
When I got this error, all the wireless functions went offline, even thought the TC light was still green.
I would shut down, shut down the Time Capsule, shut off my modem reboot everything in order.
I would come back online, but after about 20 minutes to 1.5 hours into the next backup, same thing would happen again.
Next error message:
"Disk repair. The disk 'Backup of [my computer]' was not repairable by this computer. It is being made available to you with limited functionality. You must backup your data and reformat the drive."
Then: "Time Machine Error: The backup volume is read only. To select a different volume ... Time Machine preferences ... "
I spoke to someone at Apple, who sent me the Time Machine Troubleshooting page:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3275?viewlocale=en_US
Steps I went through:
1. updated my system software
2. updated the TC firmware to 7.4.1
3. dragged the sparsebundle to DiskUtility. It took a while (more than an hour?) but said the disk could not be repaired. When I tried again, the repair function wouldn't run.
4. tried to delete the sparsebundle, but it would choke at almost the end, sometimes it would just crash the finder, sometimes say "Sorry, an unexpected error occurred," sometimes "Operation cannot be completed because the item 'bands' is in use." I even tried to Stuff the bundle with 'delete original' checked, but the stuffing, after about 15 hours, jammed near the end (stuffed 20 gigs of 35 gigs).
5. tried to reselect the TC, and run backup anyways ... now it can't find the volume, back to the error messages and crashing Finder
6. checked password in Keychain, all ok.
Now what??
Do I use Airport Utility to erase it? At least TC is still showing up there. Or press the rest button on the back of the Time Capsule to reset to factory defaults?
I've resigned myself to losing my backups. Now I would just like to get it up and running again.
In hopes,
Linda

Now what??
Do I use Airport Utility to erase it? At least TC is still showing up there. Or press the rest button on the back of the Time Capsule to reset to factory defaults?
Yes, open Airport Utility and erase the drive. Once the sparsebundle is corrupted beyond repair there's little more you can do. However, do not reset the TC. Doing so will not erase the drive, but it will remove any custom configurations you may have setup for the router. Only if that part of the TC is also misbehaving should you use the reset button.

Help, MBP Hard Drive is Read-Only, Can't access or unlock any user preferences

I could really use some help. I have searched and tried what I could but I am at a loss with what to do. I first noticed this last night when I was trying to switch users and after entering the correct password nothing would happen. I then went to Preferences to reset my password and the lock icon was closed so I clicked to unlock it and it prompted me for my password and after entering the correct one nothing happens. It simply reverts back to the same window without unlocking.
I am unable to switch users, unlock any locked preferences, install any software, etc as anything that requires my admin password won't work. I am entering the correct password because if the wrong one is entered it "shakes" and the correct one looks as if it will be accepted but it doesn't.
I have tried running repair in Disk Utility and rebooting multiple times to no avail. I finally decided to try and reinstall Lion however once I get to the page asking for admin allowance it again won't go past the password screen so I can't even do that.
After reading tons of threads I came across one that pointed to my Macintosh HD. I chose get info and it turns out that I am now Read Only. The only one with write access is System. Therefore I can't do anything.
I am completely at a loss and really need some help. Some threads I've come across mention running scripts in Terminal but I have no idea what is actually relevant for me and would really prefer some specific help. I was on 10.7.1 so I upgraded to 10.7.2 but the issue is still very much present.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Reboot and hold down the option key at the startup chime. Select Recovery HD. Launch Disk Utility. Try repairing permissions. You can also reinstall from there if you wish.
What have you been using to make backups? Time Machine or some other program?

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.

Backup drive now read-only after upgrafe to 10.5.2

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for