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Toshiba external hard drive mac read only

Permissions not ignored Being a multiuser operating system, OS X sets up access permissions for all files and folders on the system, including external drives, which are merely accessed as a folder once attached and mounted. Since permissions are set up through account UUID and UID numbers, if the drive is used with different systems, it may have permissions associated with it for accounts that your current system does not recognize, or even odd permissions settings that can prevent access to the files on the disk or to the disk itself.


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This may happen even though getting information on files and folders shows you ought to have full access to the drive. 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.


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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.

Step 2: When it displays list of drives, pick the drive which represents secondary disk and click on Next button. Once you get back all your data from external hard drive, reformat it for removing write protection from the external hard drive. Here are the steps for reformatting your Mac drive-. Now, you can able to write on your Mac external hard drive. You can even use Remo Mac Data recovery software to restore data from reformatted external hard drive on Mac. Even when you didnt find data on time Machine, you can still recover your data after from Mac after Time Machine fails with the aid of this Mac Recovery tool.

All other trademarks acknowledged. Toggle navigation. Download For Windows. Mac Data Recovery Designed for Mac users to provide comprehensive recovery of all lost data. Download For Mac. Best Seller. Repair Word Fixes. 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. 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?

Just seeing this now for some reason, sorry about that.

Remove Write Protected from External Hard Drive

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. Tons of gratitude would not be enough to say. Thank you very much, it works on my Macbook with OS Yosemite. Keep going on with any other solution Sir.

Thanks for stopping by and reading the article! It means a lot to us, check out MakeUseOf. This is one real super nice blog to fix the related problems The Free Alternative This help me a lot Thank you so much This worked beautifully. I use Yosemite OS X Did NOT want to reformat my hard drive, and this installation took maybe 10 mins.

Thank you! Glad to hear it's still working for Yosemite, I haven't tested this in a while. Thanks for leaving a comment! You the real MVP. Thanks for the article. If you already have a working filesystem, and you get the read only situation i. I had all my user directories on the second drive first partition and my workspace on the same drive in a second partition - both were showing as read only huge hint. I read this, tried it, and guess what Reminding you that you still need to backup invaluable data or at least have it on box.

Solving the "Read Only" External Hard Drive Problem on Your Mac

I'm sorry my article wasn't the help you were looking for, but I'm glad you figured it out! We take cables for granted, it's often the last thing we'll think of. Bought Paragon, installed, finally read users manual that admitted that Paragon does not work with Yosemite. One way around it is to create a symbolic link or a shortcut on your Desktop. A shortcut should now appear on your desktop for more convenient access to your write enabled external drive.

You're right Justin. My mistake. I had a few tutorials open and posted to wrong one. Feel free to delete my entry. I had a few tutorials open and I posted to the wrong one. Feel free to delete my post. Thanks I followed your instruction on: Mine is OS X Mavericks v Thanks so much! I'm glad it worked for you! I'll have to check and see if it works for Yosemite or not at some point Although I still get the warnings when mounting, installing the ntfs-3g plus its 3 dependencies did the trick on mavericks.

Thanks very much! Open your Mac's System Preferences, then click Security.

How to fix read-only external hard drive after High Sierra update?

Good luck! However, I have a small problem. Though I can freely read and write on my external hard drive, I can't make other changes to it, such as renaming it. When I click on "Get Info" of the hard drive, it shows that I have custom access. Is there a way that I can change my status to administrator so that I can rename my hard drive? I have to say: I've no idea. Are there other changes you're trying to make, or is it just the name thing? It's just the naming: So far I haven't encountered any other problems with that custom access.

Thank you anyways: Thinking about this more, I suppose you could try disabling all the tweaks you made, then changing the name, then re-enabling them. If you want. Likewise, it was upsetting me so much, as I used PC and am now stepping up on Mac in addition, and I was guessing there were incompatibilities. Thanks so much for taking the time to help by posting, it makes a difference. Sadly Apple file sys is not supported by my TV and other usb readers. Oh I didn't know that. However this post helped me a lot. Maybe I will install this driver in some other Mac.

This is not working on my Mac, it used to, but now I have to turn paragon off to access my seagate hard drive, and even then it's only read only. FAT32 is such a crappy filesystem and it's a shame there's no filesystem with full default support by the main 3 OSes.

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Then there's exFAT which is more geared towards Flash drives as opposed to spinning Hard Drives, but you need to install an extra package in most Linux distros to get it to work. FAT32 has a 4 GB file limit, which is annoying on large drives. High res or long videos. I often record videos on my capture card that are hours long, and they can be over 4 GB, and I need to transfer them to my Desktop.

How to fix read-only external hard drive after the High Sierra update?