My external drive keeps setting to read only, why???

Periodically a 1TB external drive suddenly switches to read only and won't let me save edited documents to it any longer.  It shows as read and write for my access but still won't accept written items.  I'm curious as to why.  It's getting a lot of files but still has significant space.  Is this an address space issue?  Has anyone else encountered this on their Mac? 

The drive is malfunctioning.

Similar Messages

  • [solved] External drive automatically mounted as read-only

    Hi folks,
    I have a strange issue with an external drive automatically mounted as read-only whenever I plug it to my laptop :
    [sclarckone@archLaptop ~]$ mount
    /dev/sdb1 on /run/media/sclarckone/dd type ntfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=100,fmask=0177,dmask=077,nls=utf8,errors=continue,mft_zone_multiplier=1,uhelper=udisks2)
    And I can't remount it as read-write :
    [sclarckone@archLaptop ~]$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdb1
    mount: cannot remount /dev/sdb1 read-write, is write-protected
    But of course, I'm able to mount it as read-write on other operating systems.
    I have udisks and udisks2 installed on my system. I also belong to the storage group so I thought I could mount a filesystem as a normal user but I can't :
    [sclarckone@archLaptop ~]$ mount /dev/sdb1 dd/
    mount: only root can do that
    I don't know whether it is relevant to this problem, but I have systemd and polkit installed as well... Does anybody has an idea of where the problem could come from ?
    Thanks for your help !
    Last edited by sclarckone (2012-12-13 21:45:04)

    Check out following file :
    /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.udisks.policy
    Look for mount a device and It should have configuration like :
    <action id="org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount">
    <description>Mount a device</description>
    <description xml:lang="da">Montér en enhed</description>
    <message>Authentication is required to mount the device</message>
    <message xml:lang="da">Autorisering er påkrævet for at montere et fil system</message>
    <defaults>
    <allow_any>no</allow_any>
    <allow_inactive>no</allow_inactive>
    <allow_active>yes</allow_active>
    </defaults>
    </action>

  • External OS X formatted drive keeps switching to Read Only

    Since completing the upgrade to 10.7.2, my generic external eSATA drive case holding a Caviar Green drive decides randomly that it should be read only, despite having been formatted as OS X Journalled.  Disk utiliy says that permissions have errors but I cannot repair them.  It also says taht the drive is not journaled which it was set up to be.
    Using Get Info shows system as Read & Write, wheel and everyone as Read Only.  Unlocking with the admin id does not allow changes to be made to the Read Only settings and consequently my Carbon Copy Clone update fails every time as did the Super Duper method I was using previously.
    The point of an extra backup is to keep it up to date, not to have to format the idiot thing every couple of days.
    It happened again today and given the lack of any kind of solutions found with Google, I tried to add an authorized user.  I clicked the plus sign and selected my own id.  After accepting, the id was not added, nor was the Administrator group when I tried to add that.  However for reasons I do not understand I was now able to change wheel and everyone to Read & Write.  I was able to get CCC to do its update but I continue to have issues making the privilege correction stick.
    Once I was able to filter out all the dreck about NTFS mounts, I discovered that A LOT of users were complaining about this happening and all the "helpful" advice was to reformat and start over.  That's not particularly helpful as it does not fix the problem or prevent it from happening again.
    I don't know if the workaround I discovered will work again and I suspect that since both Super Duper and CCC actually call the open source service called rsync, there may be a bug in rsync in OS X 10.7
    Anyone know the root cause and the permanent fix?
    Thanks!
    Ross

    More info.  It's not RSYNC.  My LaCIE USB3 drive that has worked flawlessly as a RW volume decided that it is Read-Only.  My trick above does not work.  What a pain in the butt this is, and no answers from Apple as to why this happens.

  • USB hard drive is set to read only?

    I'm am very new to Mac (my first one). I plug my USB Seagate drive into the Mac and it reads it fine, but says everything is read only. How do i set it up to allow the Mac to modify the files? Does the hard drive have to be reformatted to a Mac OS and/or is it possible to use the same hard drive on the Mac and PC. I have windows XP Pro SP3 installed using VM Fusion as well.
    I have done a lot of video editing Windows based and very rarely moved the files to my PC hard drive. I have to assume you can do the same with Mac, however I have been able to figure out how to do this in iMovie 2009.
    Thanks in advance,

    BRDVPRA,
    Your external drive is undoubtedly formatted as NTFS. As you already know, your Mac can read this format, but it cannot write to it. There are some third-party shareware applications that will allow your Mac to write to the NTFS volume; search for these on versiontracker.com, if you want to give this a try.
    The native Mac format is HFS+ (Mac OS Extended), which cannot be read natively by Windows. Again, there are third-party solutions for this (specifically, a Windows app called "MacDrive," also available on versiontracker.com).
    The only format that will allow reading and writing from both OS X and Windows is the FAT-32 format (called MS-DOS in Disk Utility). This format is older, and less compatible with modern file formats. For example, it will not support files larger than 4 GBs.
    The question that needs answering is whether or not you will using this drive cross-platform, or whether it will be dedicated solely to OS X. If the former, you'll need to use either the FAT-32 format or some third-party solution. If this drive will only be accessed from OS X in the future, you should copy the data, format it as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended), then return the data to it.
    Scott

  • VFAT drive keeps turning into read only

    I notice that I one of my mounted VFAT drives, after online for a while, is becoming read only. Why would this happen? To resolve it, I have to umount and then mount it. After a while, I have to do it again. Here's the relevant line in my fstab:
    /dev/hdb1 /mnt/back vfat auto,umask=000,uid=1000,gid=100 0 0
    My user id and gid are the ones you see above. Here's an ls -l output of that partition:
    drwxrwxrwx 37 ralvy users 32768 2006-02-07 19:03 back
    No writes or deletes can be done on that drive right now.
    A few seconds later, after umount/mount of /mnt/back ...
    All is fine again. Why?
    I'm running Arch current/extra up to date.

    brain0 wrote:Check your syslog (/var/log/*). There might be something that tells you the reason (though I've only such this behaviour with ext2/3 so far).
    Found this for that day:
    Feb 7 11:43:17 tux FAT: Filesystem panic (dev hdb1)
    Feb 7 11:43:17 tux fat_free_clusters: deleting FAT entry beyond EOF
    Feb 7 11:43:17 tux File system has been set read-only
    So I just did
    fsck -t vfat -a /mnt/back
    and let it fix the problems. We'll see this stops it. Sounds like it will.
    Thanks for the suggestion.

  • External Drive Permissions Locked to Read ONLY - HELP!

    Hello:
    I have recently moved from a powerbook to an imac. The external I used with the powerbook was working fine until I began to use it with the imac. Once I hooked it up to the imac, I only had read permissions. I have never set any of the permissions on the disk and have always left it open. Thinking it was just the imac, I plugged it back into the pb, to find it was also appears locked to read only. I have gone through the web looking for solutions and I cannot seem to find a solution.
    When I open get info about the disk, under sharing and permissions, its says "you can only read"
    under the list of name: wkim has read and write privlige, staff and everyone get read only. I am wkim, so what gives? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    ok. my problems were probably not related and were fixed by reinstalling 10.5.2 with the Combo Updater found on (www.apple.com/downloads)...this probably won't help you but won't hurt so may be worth a try...
    your permission problems probably have something to do with user IDs changing from one machine to the next. Try first to "repair permissions" with Disk Utility on your main HD. you can also go to Terminal and navigate to the problem directory and enter "ls -ln" to see what user ID and group ID own the files. then type just "id" to see what your local ID is. if they don't match then you'll probably need to change them with chown or chgrp.
    hopefully someone else will chime in here as 10.5 has created convoluted permission problems and I still haven't worked out my own...

  • External hard drives suddenly changed to read only

    Three of my external hard drives suddenly changed to read only. These hard drives have been working on my macbook pro for months. When I click on get info 'read only' shows up and there is no lock icon nor is there a window that shows name | permissions, also in disk utility the 'verify disk premissions', 'verify disk', 'repair disk', and 'repair disk premissions' buttons are ghosted and I can not select them. I have not made any changes to my computer and I have read many other posts and have not been able to find a solution.

    About a hundred times with no luck. Some of my research is leading to Western Digital, there may be a problem with the drives' 'smartware' software. I've been using this drive for months and I never used the 'smartware', but I tried it anyway with no luck. I just remembered that four days ago I had this drive plugged this drive into an Iomega wireless storage device and it seemed to work fine. Now the wireless storage device can't find the drive at all. I just need to know if there is a way I can change the permissions back to read/write, otherwise I will have to buy another drive and transfer all the data to the new drive and re-formatt the wd drive.

  • My External Seagate Hard drive just changed to read only

    my External Seagate Hard drive just changed to read only on its own?
    I went to get info and scrolled down to the  Sharing and Permissions
    But there is nothing there but a greyed out : You can only read
    There are No boxes to check or uncheck, No options to change to read and write, No name of owner or ignore ownership box. NOTHING ELSE IS THERE
    HELP!
    I have recently upgraded to Mountain Lion and am having other problems as well

    Click on the external HDD icon COMMAND+I.  You should see a display such as this:
    You should be logged on as the administrator.  Click on the lock icon.  It should open and allow you to make the required changes.
    Ciao.

  • I have an external hard drive but it is read only on my macbook.

    I have an external hard drive but it is read only on my macbook. I have tried my friends which works on his macbook but this is also read only on mine. Do I need to change any settings?

    Here's my lo-tech solution (if you have Parallels) to this frustrating problem:
    Eject your hard drive.
    Unplug (USB) your hard drive from the MAC .
    Start Parallels.
    When Windows has started, plug your drive back into the MAC.
    You should get a little screen asking if you want the drive to be utilized by MAC or Windows. Select Windows.
    Use Windows to copy your files over to the hard drive.
    This is less than ideal and not a long-term solution, but I was afraid of attempting any reformatting since I have many files on my hard drive. 
    Just remember that Windows has to be running first, before you plug in your hard drive.

  • I have a MacBook Air w/ 64 GB. I have hours and hours of music/vids/etc. Is it possible to have an external drive specifically set-up for my iTunes? If so, what do I need to do? Thanks!

    I have a MacBook Air w/ 64 GB. I have hours and hours of music/vids/etc. Is it possible to have an external drive specifically set-up for my iTunes? If so, what do I need to do? Thanks!

    Yes, many people do just that. Copy your iTunes folder to the external drive. Once done, open iTunes with Option held down and select the new location of the library file.

  • Permissions on Android AT200 removable SD card set to read only

    Recently the removale SD card on my at200 has been set to read only for all but a few applications. This mean that when editing or trying to save, copy docs on the SD card I get the "not enough permissions" message. Any editing by these applications requires shifting files to onboard SD card and back again.
    Toshiba file manager is able to rw OK, but my other file manager fails, as does ezy PDF.
    Reading the attributes of the SD card show that it is set to rw for data.p (permissions XML). But looking at info from file manager shows sdcard directories and files set to dr- or -r-.
    Is there some way of getting this changed to allow access for all my installed apps? Or even some?
    Cheers
    rabel

    MisterX,
    Found this note from zc2 on the xda forum dealing with the same issue December 2011.
    "The owners of Honeycomb-powered tablets experience a problem writing to the external SD card, because since v3.2 the permissions for the files there were changed from sdcard_rw to media_rw.
    According the file /system/etc/permissions/platform.xml, any application with declared permission "android.permission.WRITE_MEDIA_STORAGE" should be included to that media_rw group.
    But that won't happen.
    I made a test application to show the group membership (it just executes the "id" command), and according to its output, the application is not member of the media_rw group, despite the "android.permission.WRITE_MEDIA_STORAGE" permission is mentioned in its manifest.xml"
    This is somewhat confirmed by a comment returned to me from the AntTek File Explorer developers on an interum work around for this problem (a common one since 3.2)
    "While waiting, the simple solution, if your device is rooted, is as follows:
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    2. Navigate to /system/etc/permissions.
    3. Open platform.xml and find the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission.
    4. Add an additional group definition for this permission: <group gid="media_rw" />. It will grant AntTek Explorer (and other applications) permission to writing to removable SD Card. After edited, it will look like:
    <permission name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE">
    <group gid="sdcard_rw" />
    <group gid="media_rw" />
    </permission>
    5. Save the changes to the file.
    6. Restart your tablet."
    My tablet is not rooted so this was not available to me, but it appears this is a major issue for Honeycomb, including the version on the AT200. Is there any plans to fix this bug do you think? Or is there a date for the promised update to ICS for the AT200, another prime selling point.
    Cheers

  • Accidently changed the "ownership & permissions" access admin setting to "read only"

    In the "Get Info" window on my MacBook hard drive icon, I accidently changed the "ownership & permissions" access admin setting to "read only" & now it won't re-boot the operating system. Just displays the Apple logo & running wheel on a white screen . Any advice on how best to re-set/restore would be very much appreciated, thanks

    This might help. Otherwise, it might be necessary to reinstall.
    https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2240

  • How to set the read only property for dynamic ALV column

    Hi All,
    I have built one dynamiv ALV and I have one name column inside that ALV for which I have to set read only property based on two column fields that exist in the same ALV,say IS_SP and IS_CORP of type boolean.
    If any one of the flag is 'X',i have to make that name column as display only and
    If both flag are not set,it should be displayed as ediatable column.
    I have written one method as INIT_ALV which gets called when ALV is loaded.
    Code is as  follows:
      lr_column_settings ?= wd_this->alv_all_roles.
      lt_columns = lr_column_settings->get_columns( ).
    LOOP AT lt_columns INTO ls_column.
    CASE ls_column-id.
       WHEN <NAMECOLUMN>. "name column which should be editable/display
    Create Input Field
            CREATE OBJECT lr_uie_input_field_ro
              EXPORTING
                value_fieldname = ls_column-id.
         ls_column-r_column->set_cell_editor( lr_uie_input_field_ro ).
        After this,I have to set the read only property based on IS_SP and IS_CORP values,
              CALL METHOD lr_uie_input_field_ro->set_read_only_fieldname
              EXPORTING
                *value = 'IS_SP' or 'IS_CORP'
    ENDLOOP.
    I dont want to use cell variants also.
    Help me to achieve this.
    Thanks and Regards,
    Divya

    Divya - I have done it in the past following these documents. Please read it and try it it will work.
    Please read it in the following order since both are a continuation documents for the same purpose (it also contains how to change colors of row dynamically but I didnt do that part I just did the read_only part as your requirement) 
    http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/f0625002-596c-2b10-46af-91cb31b71393
    http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/d0155eb5-b6ce-2b10-3195-d9704982d69b?quicklink=index&overridelayout=true
    thanks!
    Jason PV

  • I purchased a IMac in Feb later I added a Seagate ext. hard drive. On April 29 I received an errors that the ext. Drive may be a read only and not backing up files. I'm unable to check disk permission or correct errors. Help would be appreciated.

    I purchased a IMac in Feb later I added a Seagate ext. hard drive. On April 29 I received an errors that the ext. Drive may be a read only and not backing up files. I'm unable to check disk permission or correct errors. Help would be appreciated.

    Click on the hard drive on the desktop, then File > Get Info. What does it say about permissions?  If this is just a data drive you may want to consider "ignore ownership on this volume".
    Otherwise I can only say I have not been reading good things about Seagate drives recently.  I have some of their rock-solid ones from about 10 years ago (still running well), but now...?

  • Set to read only

    in  sender file adapter in processing mode what is the use of set to read only  option
    regards
    raghu

    Hi,
    This set to read only mode for sender file communication channel will process the fiels have write permission and change it to Read only to not to modify it later on.
    this option is available for NFS only (Native file system)
    Thanks
    Swarup

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