External hard drive in "only read" permission

I have a macbook air and a sony external hard drive. Although my mac sees the hard drive i have permission to "only read". Why? How can I get it to work?

Hi i have same problem but quite different.. if anybody knows the resoultion please help me out.. i have 250 gb external harddisk drive was using for my perosnal in my mac book and i use for windows also. suddently i don't what's wrong with my mac.. today morning i connect to my mac book it shows the external drive is read only file system. i cann't able to write the data on it.But if i connect to some other macbook it works perfectly.. i did check for other external harddisk drive and pen drive . only in my mac it shows read. only.. please help me out this issue..

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External hard drive suddenly become read only

For those who have been using an external hard drive on OS X (using NTFS file system) without any problem and suddenly one day the system has started mounting it as a read only file system, this is because the file system right now has some inconsistences.
As it happened last night to me i started googling for a quick solution to solve the problem. But i didnt find anything out there. At least at first glance. So then i checked the system logs of the system in order to get some sort of specific information about why that was happening (in OS you have an application that makes so easy to have a look through the system logs and its in /applications/utilities/console.app). In my case, and i repeat, IN MY CASE, the problem was the following:
21/07/11 18:59:02 kernel NTFS-fs warning (device /dev/disk1s1, pid 2140): ntfs_system_inodes_get(): $MFTMirr does not match $MFT. Will not be able to remount read-write. Run ntfsfix and/or chkdsk.
So afterwards once known the problem, was as easy as to mount the external HD in windows and execute the command chkdsk /f (google about the usage of the tool if dont know how it works).
Alternatively, you have the Linux option using the ntfsfix command, but you will need to install the program before that (if dont have it previously in your system) or otherwise you won't be able to use it (sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs)
Hope it helps.
Marc

I got an error message that my External Hard Drive was now 'read only'. Having scoured the various forums looking for clues as to why it had happened I found numerous suggestions, all of which seemed overly complicated and beyond my basic understanding (I'm old enough to remember when Macs 'just worked').
Anyway, among the suggestions on how to correct this I found what seemed like an overly simplified one - 'Don't switch on your external hard drive until after you've booted up'. Since I tend to leave mine on all the time, I immediately turned it off and back on again and ran Time Machine in hope rather than expectation. Would you believe it? It backed up as normal first time. Hope it works for anyone else having the same problem.

I have a FAT 32 External Hard Drive marked as Read Only that is unchangeable by an administrator or root user, how can I make it read/Write

Hello, All,
I have a FAT 32 External Hard Drive marked as Read Only that is unchangeable by an administrator or root user, how can I make it read/Write without reformatting it ?

Hi Kappy,
Just wondering if you had any advice for my situation . . .
My time machine backup was backing up to a drive that was "Mac OS X Enteded Journaled, Case Sensitive." I had no idea what this meant, or that it would even cause issues.
I took my computer to the Apple store yesterday, and they wiped it clean. When they tried to restore it from the Time Machine backup drive, it would not work. Their guess is that Time Machine cannot restore from a drive that is "case sensitive."
Any thoughts on how I can convert my time machine backup data from a "case sensitive" state, to a "non-case sensitive" state? I've tried to just drag and drop the files from the case sensitive formatted drive to a new drive that I have that is formatted non case sensitive, but I get the following error message:
"The volume has the wrong case sensitivity for a backup"
I just really want my data back - I thought TimeMachine was the way to go (and was supposed to work) but unfortunately it is not.
Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,

External Hard Drive showing as Read Only

I have an external hard drive I've been using on Windows XP for the longest time. I never set any permission settings on it, and I even made it a freely shared network drive on XP. Any other Windows computer I plug the drive into, I can freely read and write. I can't write to it in Mac. I used to not even be able to view the drive at all under Tiger, but now in Leopard I can read but I can't write.
How can I change the permissions? If I try it through Windows XP there's nothing to change since there's no permission settings on it, it's freely readable and writable to all.

Hi i have same problem but quite different.. if anybody knows the resoultion please help me out.. i have 250 gb external harddisk drive was using for my perosnal in my mac book and i use for windows also. suddently i don't what's wrong with my mac.. today morning i connect to my mac book it shows the external drive is read only file system. i cann't able to write the data on it.But if i connect to some other macbook it works perfectly.. i did check for other external harddisk drive and pen drive . only in my mac it shows read. only.. please help me out this issue..

External hard drives appear as read only.....

Therefore, I can't change any of the info on them. I have two external hard rives mainly for music, and both of them are available only to read. How do I change the permission for that. They are both my external hard drives that I used with my PC. Thx for any help.

I have the same problem. I'm using a SimpleTech SimpleDrive Deluxe (via firewire), formatted by PC running Windows XP. I just checked "Get Info" and drive is indeed formatted with NTFS. So ... would this solution work:
Drag what's now on the external drive (backups from last 2 PCs -- I'm a recent switcher ...) onto my Mac desktop, reformat external drive in some non-Windows-proprietary format (specifics on how to do so obviously welcome!), drag my old backup files back onto the external drive, then be able to write happily to the drive from either Mac or PC?
Thanks!!

My external hard drive is in Read Only mode...

My external hard drive, which I have used before, is in "Read Only Mode."
I have put files on this drive and taken files off of it before, so it isn't an NTFS issue.
I am still able to write with a different Mac.
FYI, this is a Late-2011 Macbook Air.

You are about to format your storage device. Be sure to copy and take the back up before formatting. Just select the physical disc you want to reformat in the tree on the left-hand side of Disk Utility. You can select a new file system format from the drop down below, and also name the new volume to be created. Showing the info of the newly formatted drive, you can see the disc is now set to read and write.

External Hard drive is suddenly Read only. Help!

I reformatted my I mac due to it being extremely slow. After reformat, the toshiba external hard drive that I have been using for months before with no problem, is now a read only. I have over 1TB of space available and I need to use it. Does anyone know what happened and how to fix it. I cant lose my information.

In the Finder, press the key combination shift-command-C, or select
Go ▹ Computer
from the menu bar. A window will open showing all mounted volumes. Select the one in question and open the Info window. What is shown as the Format in the General section?

External Hard Drive stuck on Read Only

I just moved an external hard drive that had been attached to a Vista PC over to my Mac. However, I can't edit anything on the disk from my Mac, because it's in Read Only mode. I'm sure Vista set some sort of security on it, but from Vista I gave every group possible Full Access to the disk. Is there any way to override Read Only mode from the Mac, or in the alternative, does anyone know how to override the security settings from Vista?

Indeed, if the disk was reformatted (possibly by the first person who used it) Vista is set to format to NTFS by default. In this case, you will not be able to write to the disk.
If you want to be able to write to the disk, you should pull all your important information off of it and onto the Mac's hard drive (if possible). Then click the smiley (Finder) and go to *Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility* Locate the volume of the hard drive in question in the pane on the left, it will be the second hard drive, slightly below the hard drive. The Format: listed toward the bottom of the window will tell you whether or not the drive is NTFS. If it is, go to the erase tab and Set the Volume Format to either Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or MS-DOS File System.
MS-DOS formatting will allow the drive to be read and written to by both PC and Mac, but the Mac will not be able to read or write from this format as quickly as it can in disks that are it's own Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
*It's recommended, for performance and integrity, that you format the drive with Mac OS Extended (Journaled).* This type of disk will be readable on a PC without third party software, but only with third party software. If you're going to capture or play video off of this drive, then don't even consider the MS-DOS format.
If you can't see the option for MS-DOS, make sure you're selecting the drive itself, it should be just above the drive you selected and should start with a number followed by GB and a manufacturer name.
Also, realize that FireWire is faster than USB 2.0, in case this drive has both, use FireWire and not USB 2.0 (for improved performance in either format).
By the way, welcome to the world of Mac, you will see it truly is a community.

HT201250 My external hard drive suddenly says "read-only" should I run a disk repair on it and what does that do?

Has any one used Disk Repair on an external hard drive? Does it erase everything?

Repair the Hard Drive
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
Fix Permissions for a Locked Drive
Open Terminal in the Utilities folder. Paste the following at the prompt. Press RETURN after each. The first command will prompt for you to enter your admin password. It will not be echoed to the screen. After entering your password press RETURN again.
sudo chflags 0 /volumes/*
sudo chmod a+rx /volumes/*
killall finder
An alternative is to download BatChmod and use it to fix the permissions.

Windows Easy Transfer (WET) Issues with External Hard Drive - "Can't read from the source file or disk"

I work for Office Depot, in the tech department. Basically, one of our associates was supposed to do a data backup, and re-install Windows 7, then transfer the files back. He used Windows Easy Transfer and compacted everything into a 163 GB file.
Now comes the hard part. When we try to put it back on his computer ((drag-and-drop to the desktop) which has been wiped back to factory settings using the recovery partition), it stops at 79.5 GB remaining (you know how it doesn't give you a % of completion,
it just shows how many GB are remaining) and then says "Can't read from the source file or disk" and gives you an option to try again, or cancel. It gets hung up on the same point each time.
Normally, this wouldn't be a huge issue, but the contents on the drive are his wife's architect blueprints and interior design stuff, along with wedding photos, etc, which are the only copies they have. On top of those, they have court documents and other
important files that we are unable to access now.
I wasn't involved with this transfer, so I'm trying to clean up the mess as best I can. I remembered that the customer's wife was Russian, and had some files typed with a Russian keyboard, so on and so forth. I wonder if that's the issue? If not, I really
have no idea how to manually extract things from a ".mig" file, or how to diagnose what area is potentially corrupted.
In light of this situation, we tried using "Recuva" to recover the files post-wipe, but everything was corrupted or unable to be opened, and it also extracted and recovered all of the "useless" photos, such as the skype logos, up and
down arrows for browsers, etc (it was 160,000+ photos).
Trying to avoid a potential lawsuit, unhappy customer, and costing the company lots of money to see if professionals can get into this external hard drive.
Other relevant information:
We used a Toshiba 500 GB (465 GB) external hard drive.
Customer's computer is an HP Pavilion P6000 Series (Model No. p6520y) running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 1.
Any other information that is needed can be provided, thanks in advance, and hopefully we can find a solution to this issue quickly!
-John

I think there's a lack of understanding somewhere.
"If you even can't start the process, please unplug it from your new PC. Then head back to your new computer and plug
the external drive back in to your new computer. "
Unplug from new, head back to new, plug it back in? That doesn't make much sense! Haha.
I knew what you meant though, somewhat. When I search through the drives after clicking yes (Has windows easy transfer
already saved your files blah blah blah) I click on the transfer file and it says "Windows Easy Transfer could not open the file".
Rather than drag-and-drop the file to the desktop, I now tried to double-click on the file itself while it was plugged
into the computer. It opened, and it started transferring until it was about 70% completed, and then an error popped up saying "WET can't open the easy transfer file, make sure your USB device is plugged in or check your internet connection".
I checked, and the USB hard drive's light wasn't on. Now, I unplug it and plug it back in, and the light comes back on,
so I click Retry, and it resets the bar back to nothing and says "Transfer time: 1 minute".
Rather than continue trying, I clicked "Cancel" instead of Retry, and it says "Your transfer did not complete successfully."
It says to click "view report" for more information, but there's no "view report button".
At the moment, I am scanning the External Drive for bad sectors using the check disk tool in properties. It's frozen
at "0 USN bytes processed".

External hard drive documents not read on a MacBook Pro

Hi all,
I use my external hard drive to save a document from another PC computer last week when I plugged it back on my Mac the documents cannot be read on a Mac as it says they are not supports by apps software or search for application that will open those files.
I have all the documents which I copy from my previous Toshiba Laptop which was windows7 but is there way to clean the external drive on Mac without loosing all the document? or how do I format my external hard disk on MacBook Pro?
Jok2

You can copy these documents to the internal drive of your MacBook Pro and then, format the external drive. If you want to use the external drive on Macs and PCs, I recommend you to format your external drive on a PC to use exFAT, better than NTFS or FAT32. You can also use FAT32 but it isn't compatible with files bigger than 4 GB, and NTFS disks can't be written on Macs. If you want to use this external drive only with your Mac, you can use Disk Utility to format the external drive using "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". Read > http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html
Depending on the application you used to create the documents on the PC, you have to install an application that reads these documents. For example, if you created these documents with Office, you can use Office for Mac, iWork or LibreOffice. Each one has got its advantages and disadvantages

External hard drive to be read and write for MAC & PC

All,
I recently bought a Mac Book Pro and have always used a PC until now, which i used an external hard drive to use to copy files to. My mac does not let me write to this hard drive.
What do i have to do to be able to read and write to this hard drive on my MAC & PC?

your drive is formatted NTFS. OS X can only read but not write to NTFS drives. you can reformat it FAT which is writable from both OS X and windows. (this will wipe the drive of course). However, FAT is an inferior format with a number of limitations. another option is to install macfuse and NTFS-3g on your mac
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
It will let you write to NTFS formatted drives.

How do I export my edited images from my iMac to an external hard drive? Only the originals transfer.

How do I export edited images from my iMac Lightroom 5 programme to an external hard drive? It seems that only the originals transfer.

In the export dialog don't choose original. Choose specific export settings for your purpose e.g. for a website, emailing or for printing.
You can choose jpeg, tiff etc and also select the size you need, sharpening and quality - click image below which shows an example of exporting jpegs in the sRGB color space.

External Hard drive won't read on iMac

I recently got a new pc and I was using an external hard drive to transfer the files that I wanted from my mac to my pc. I put all the files on that I needed and when I went to copy them to my pc, apparently I did something I shouldn't have? I need to format the drive to use it on my PC, but now when I reattach the Hard Drive to my mac, it is now unable to be read. I would just format it and erase everything but all of my brother's files are stored in it. Is there any way I can view these files on my mac again?

If the hard drive needs to be +read and write+ on both a Mac and Windows PC, it needs to be formatted as FAT32, aka +MS-DOS (FAT)+ in Disk Utility.
If the drive was formatted for Mac, you may have caused data corruption in some way when you connected it to the Windows PC. You said
apparently I did something I shouldn't have?
so it depends on what that "something" you did was.
When you connect it to the Mac now, the drive's volume does not show up in Finder, correct? But if you run Disk Utility, does the drive appear in the Disk Utility sidebar? If so, is there a volume indented under the drive (in the sidebar)? If so, can you select the volume (which may be grayed out) and click the Mount button to mount it? If so, the volume may become accessible through Finder.
If the drive appears, but there is no volume that you can mount, select the drive and go to the +First Aid+ tab. Click on the +Repair Disk+ button. Note if any errors are reported, and if there are errors, if Disk Utility was able to repair them.

HELP !!! External hard drive MBA/PC read/write

HELP !!! I have justbought an MBA and want to be able to read/write to an external hard drive netween both the MBA and PC. Help! Do I need to partition the hard drive or is FAT (FAT 32 ?) format still the best method? Grateful for any advice

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
As you know, OS X hasn't got NTFS write support. If your external drive is formatted in NTFS, you can install a third-party application to be able to write in the external drive like Paragon NTFS.
However, in my opinion, that's not the best option. OS X supports two filesystems which are compatible with PCs: FAT32 and exFAT. FAT32 is a filesystem which is limited to files smaller than 4 GB, and exFAT is like FAT32 but without this restriction so, if you can, format the external drive with exFAT.
To do it, first you have to copy all the files you have on the external drive to a Mac or PC, because you will lose them from the external drive. Then, format the external drive on a PC. If you do it on a Mac, PCs won't recognize this external drive. exFAT is compatible with Windows XP SP3 or newer and Mac OS X 10.6.5 or newer

External hard drive in "only read" permission

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