External hard drive not writable in mac

how do i make an external hard disk conne… - Apple Community

To prevent such errors from happening, OS X includes a setting to ignore permissions on external drives, so all files on the drive should be fully accessible regardless of their permissions settings. To set this option for external drives, select the drive on your desktop or in the Finder sidebar, and then press Command-I to get information on the drive. In the information window that pops up, go to the Sharing section and click the lock to authenticate.

Then check the box to "ignore ownership on this volume," or toggle it off and then on if it's already enabled. If this setting is enabled and you still do not have access, you can try removing the system's volume information database, which holds this setting for external drives on the system. In here, locate the file called "volinfo. Once this is complete, detach and reattach your external drive, and then try toggling the setting to ignore ownership on the volume. Note that these permissions settings will only be available on drives with formats that support them, so if you are using a FATformatted drive, the option to ignore permissions will not be available.

Check drive for errors Formatting errors can also cause a drive to be read-only. While in many cases formatting errors are relatively minor and tolerated by the system, there are times when the system may determine it safest to only mount the drive in a read-only state to prevent corruption to the data on it. When this happens, you should see a warning when attaching the drive that states it is only being mounted in read-only mode, and in these cases you should first back up all contents on the drive. Then use Disk Utility or another robust disk or volume repair tool like DiskWarrior to check the drive for errors and attempt to fix them.

Sometimes errors can go unnoticed on a drive, so if these tools report the drive is working OK, then consider wiping the drive and repartitioning it. Download FUSE to get started. The program is a handler; it does not contain anything to mount and read the files themselves. That is another single command:. If that happens, run this command as well:. You need to run a few extra commands to get it working. First, find the address of your mounted read-only drive. You can get this in the Terminal using the command:. You need to run the following commands each time that you want to mount a drive with write permissions.

The devs make it clear that this opens up your Mac to potential exploitation, so this step is not for the faint of heart. You can test drive the software with a day trial too. Better still, your NTFS drives now show up in Finder normally, and you can treat them like any other drive.

With a day free trial, you can put the program through its paces before shelling out. Rather than a menu bar item, Tuxera installs as a preference pane. You can format drives from here, but not much else. Like Paragon, you can use Finder to work with the drive. Both paid options offer a painless way to mount a read-only drive on your Mac and make it writable.

You can also write as much data as you need to and from your drives while trialing both paid options. But having a read-only drive is not the only external disk problem you can face on a Mac. Here's a troubleshooting guide to help get your external hard drive or flash drive working again. Read More for tips on how to solve that issue. Explore more about: Your email address will not be published. Why isn't Psiphon 3 here? It can tunnel through anything in seconds!

It's for free on Android, Windows, and Oh right Thank you, Justin. Doing the Paragon trial. Process could not have been easier. From my wife saying "Hey, what the hell is going on with my external drive? Thank you so much for your post, it saved my life!

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I was trying to back up my files to an external drive previously used on a Windows computer, and it was read-only and I freaked out! Thanks to you, I was able to backup all my important files and make the drive compatible so I could upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion! This is BS. Thanks but I prefer Windows. SO much easier. This link saved my life: I installed this driver and not only did I not have to format wipe my hard drive, it solved the incompatibility issue in 1 minute.

I backed up my hard drive just out of paranoid precaution beforehand, but looks like I didn't need to. Thanks to this info, my problem is solved in a minute with just a driver installation and a reboot. I am using a Samsung external hard drive.

• [Solved] How to fix Seagate external hard drive read-only on Mac?.
• Case 2: Access permissions on Seagate external hard drive are not ignored.
• mac pages undo reduce file size.

I downloaded the driver at: Thaaaank you so much! I just got my laptop back from the genius bar at Apple. Tthey installed a new hard drive - something went wrong while I tried updating the OS earlier this year Perhaps my hard drive couldn't handle the update? Anyway, I saved most of my files on my seagate external hard drive before everything went down hill.

Ran into the same problem and was literally seconds away from wiping it clean, luckily, I saw this comment!

Solving read-only conditions for external hard drives

Solved the issue in no time. Well I edited fstab per guidance and in deed my drives disappeared from Finder. It means that I cannot use native Mac and need windows on fusion. I haven't looked into this method in the rootless age, and honestly this article could use an update in any case. I believe someone is one it. Only if you disable rootless, which is not usually advised.

I highly recommend going with one of the other options.

I read that program NTFS corrupts data. I had no problem with my hard drives being written to until I switched to Capitan! What do I do? It seems like I'm going to have to re-do this tutorial for El Capitan, because the instructions don't work right now and I've no idea how to make them work. I get an error message saying that it's incompatible with this software version of the Mac. The link has been hacked and goes to avangate software.

Type the link manually gets to the correct place! However, theres a message that popped up saying the mount wasn't completely done, and I had two options either force or abort.

How to Fix Seagate External Hard Drive Read-only on Mac?

I chose force, and everything was fine, but I'm worried if it might delete files in the future? I tried plugging in another external hard drive and the message didn't appear again. Thanks for the update, I actually haven't tried repeating these steps with El Capitan yet so this is really helpful. I'm sure there will be more comments. Library not loaded: Please help me fix this issue or let me know how to uninstall this. So I could get access to my files. Because the messages implies you didn't though I could be wrong.

I've just converted from an iMac to a Macbook My external hard drive works on the iMac, but is read only on the Macbook. Do you know why this is and how I can fix it?

Case 1: Seagate external hard drive is NTFS formatted

Just seeing this now for some reason, sorry about that. Did you get everything working? It might be a permissions error but it's hard to troubleshoot without being able to actually test things out. Dear Justin Pot, I'm personally amazed with your detailed solution here. I'm having a problem using my Seagate external hard drive.

I only have permission to read files on my external hard drive, but I am not allowed to write or edit files on the drive when using Mac OS. Why this happened and how to fix Seagate external hard drive read-only on Mac? Seagate is one of the most popular brands of storage devices all over the world and its external hard drive is favored by numerous customers. But sometimes, we are having trouble backing up or copying files to Seagate external hard drive and Seagate external hard drive becomes read-only.

In fact, read-only Seagate external hard drive results from various reasons. This article will point out three common cases and offer different solutions. To make sure, we can go to Disk Utility and check the format information. Here recommend two reliable ones. Step 1: Step 2: Aside from writing to read-only NTFS external hard drive on Mac, iBoysoft Drive Manager is also a wonderful tool to manage external drives and network drives. It offers a menu bar from which we can mount, unmount and remount network drives and external drives with a single click.

It automatically records the information of network drive at the first time we connect it to Mac, so network drive only need to be set up once and later can be directly mounted without bothering to input information again and again.