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.

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

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