|
Topic
:
Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
 |
This topic has been archived - replies are not allowed.
|
|
|
This question is not answered.
"Helpful" answers available: 1
.
"Solved" answers available: 1
.
|
|
Replies
:
16
-
Pages
:
2
[
1
2
|
Next
]
-
Last Post
:
Jan 24, 2008 1:29 PM
by: solo hans
|
|
|
Posts:
8
From:
Dobbs Ferry, NY
Registered:
Nov 13, 2007
|
|
|
|
Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Nov 13, 2007 7:48 AM
|
|
|
Here's my story:
On Sunday I upgraded my relatively new MacBook Pro (meaning, I haven't had it long enough to install any wonky third party applications) from 10.4 to Leopard. TM was one of my primary motivators for the upgrade. I plugged my brand new 500GB MyBook external FW drive in to my older 400GB MyBook FW drive, and plugged that into the laptop. I'd had the older drive formatted for Mac by the eBay seller and use it to store movies and such. I got the 500 off the shelf at Costco.
My internal hard drive name has a space in it, but in file sharing the computer name does not have any non alpha characters.
I launched TM and pointed it to the new drive as the backup location. It said the drive had to be formatted. I was not surprised. I told it to go ahead.
It finished in a reasonable amount of time, naming the drive "Time Machine Backup" (or something similar, with spaces in the name) and started making the initial backup. I proceded to play a couple hours of World of Warcraft (but that's another forum  while it worked. It was still going when I called it a night, but it was making progress backing up about 100GB.
In the morning it was done. No error messages. I accessed the freaky stargate display and saw tons of backed up files and applications. Good so far. I shut the computer down and headed for work where I'm forced to use an HP and Windows.
After booting up last night TM displayed a message (I'm paraphrasing here since I'm at work now): "Backup Failed -- backup disc is read only."
Huh?
I did "Get Info" on the disc and it says I have read/write access. Guests have read only. I was not able to change these permissions (the Get Info window is locked).
I brought up Disc Utility thinking to fix permissions. I can only fix permissions on the internal drive, this option is greyed out for both externals. I verified permissions on the main drive, just to be safe. No issues found.
I changed the FW daisy chain, putting the 500GB drive first so it's directly connected to the computer. No luck, didn't really expect it.
I dragged a file from the main drive over to the backup drive. It copied. I trashed it from the backup drive. It trashed. Definitely read/write.
Key Questions:
Obviously I can read and write to the drive, so why can't TM?
What do I do to fix it?
Secondary Questions:
The system offered to format the drive and I let it. If drive format is the problem here (which seems to be the case with others having problems), why the heck wouldn't the system format it correctly?
If spaces in the drive name are a problem (perhaps they aren't), why would it use a name that has them?
MacBookPro 17"
Mac OS X (10.5)
MyBook 400 and 500 FW drives, iPhone, G4 dual processor
|
|
Posts:
73
Registered:
Sep 1, 2004
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Nov 13, 2007 12:59 PM
in response to: MiaMc
|
|
|
I would have started with the Get Info from finder too, to find out who have permissions. Done and done.
Next, I'd check the formatting. From the Apple menu, choose About This Mac, then on that dialog box, click the 'More Info' button, the will bring up the System Profiler application. From the Hardware category, highlight USB, if that's how your drive is connected to your system(Note: Have your drive mounted). This will give you access to more valuable information such as where your drive is mounted, the file system being used(default in your case), Partition Map Type(assuming partition was applied).
My gut tells me there was a problem with formatting, but the error message leads me to think permissions. Since have permission for the drive, do you think there are restrictions in the directory.
Check the permissions for the folders in the directory.
Two more options at your discretion:
Erase drive in Disk Utility, reformat, let Time Machine take it from there as it will do when it recognises a external drive.
Tinker with Terminal, if you are comfortable with app and set permissions there.
If you need more help let me know(i.e., formatting in Disk Utility)
Good Luck
Hans.
iBook, Dual usb, 20GB, 700mhG3
Mac OS X (10.4.2)
|
|
Posts:
73
Registered:
Sep 1, 2004
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Nov 13, 2007 1:20 PM
in response to: solo hans
|
|
Helpful
|
|
|
Edit: I just read your post again. I see that the drive will read and write, and that just time machine is having the trouble.
More:
In the Get Info window, do you have permission under the name category for "(unknown)/Read & Write" in addition to guests and yourself. I've had a successful TM set up and have this entry for permissions and I'm thinking this grants TM permission to access all(ALL) files on system when applicable.
Do you think TM's .plist was corrupted? If you do, trash it and let TM rebuild a new one. I don't think this is the problem, but maybe it's worth a try.
Do what ever you think necessary before you go through a lengthy back up again.
Cheers.
Message was edited by: solo hans
iBook, Dual usb, 20GB, 700mhG3
Mac OS X (10.4.2)
|
|
Posts:
8
From:
Dobbs Ferry, NY
Registered:
Nov 13, 2007
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Nov 14, 2007 4:22 PM
in response to: solo hans
|
|
|
Thank you to everyone for the helpful guidance. Here's what happened next:
I got home from work and turned on the computer and checked the TM preferences. I noticed that the last back-up was 8:00 that morning -- but I'd gotten the "read-only" error message the previous evening. Hummm.
I used the system profiler to check the formatting on both of my external MyBook drives. The file system on the older one, that I had paid a (small) fee to have the seller format for Mac, is MS-DOS FAT32 - looks like I was ripped off there. The newer one, that I use for backups and TM/Leopard reformatted, is Case-sensitive HFS+.
I did "Get Info" on the drive. This time I could click on the lock, enter my password, unlock it, and change permissions if I wanted to. But I didn't, because it listed me and "unknown" as read & write and "Everyone" as Read only -- the proper settings based on advice posted here.
For good measure I checked to be sure the computer name in file sharing had no spaces or non-alpha characters, and removed the spaces from the external drive name (which TM/Leopard had put there).
TM has been backing up properly since yesterday. The only thing I can think of that I actually did prior to it starting to work was verifying the permissions. Maybe, although no issues were reported, this did actually fix something.
MacBookPro 17"
Mac OS X (10.5)
MyBook 400 and 500 FW drives, iPhone, G4 dual processor
|
|
Posts:
73
Registered:
Sep 1, 2004
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Nov 15, 2007 3:00 AM
in response to: MiaMc
|
|
|
So are you 'good to go?'
iBook, Dual usb, 20GB, 700mhG3
Mac OS X (10.4.2)
|
|
Posts:
8
From:
Dobbs Ferry, NY
Registered:
Nov 13, 2007
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Nov 26, 2007 11:13 AM
in response to: solo hans
|
|
|
An update:
TM ran successfully for several days.
I should explain that I usually turn the laptop on in the evening and use it, then leave it on overnight since I've got the iPhone plugged in and am too lazy to switch the phone to a separate charger. In the morning I do a quick email check and shut it down for the day while I go to work.
So one afternoon a few days after getting TM to work I turned it on and when I came back to it a bit later I saw the "back up disk is read-only" message. I did Get Info on the drive and sure enough, the properties were locked again (I couldn't unlock the little lock to change read/write rights. I had done nothing related to permissions, not even installed any other software.
I rebooted and forced a TM backup. It worked. And has continued to work since then, for several weeks.
I'm not marking this question as answered because I'm still not sure what causes the problem and what fixes it. Just rebooting to fix everything smacks too much of that other OS, far below Mac standards.
Mia
MacBookPro 17"
Mac OS X (10.5)
MyBook 400 and 500 FW drives, iPhone, G4 dual processor
|
|
Posts:
8
From:
Dobbs Ferry, NY
Registered:
Nov 13, 2007
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Nov 28, 2007 7:44 AM
in response to: MiaMc
|
|
|
For the last two days I've been getting the "drive is read-only error" again.
When it happend the day before yesterday I rebooted and forced a backup, and it worked. Yesterday I was in the middle of things and just didn't bother. Curious though, that rebooting should work, when starting up cold after a few hours off does not.
In any case, my problem is definitely not solved, simply worked-around.
MacBookPro 17"
Mac OS X (10.5)
MyBook 400 and 500 FW drives, iPhone, G4 dual processor
|
|
Posts:
23
From:
St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Registered:
Aug 17, 2005
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Dec 16, 2007 9:50 AM
in response to: MiaMc
|
|
|
MiaMc, I have had this same problem with my drobo and Time Machine saying it is Read-Only.
Through trial and error I think I have got my problem to work out successfully. My drobo drive is connected via USB and when I turn on my Mac the drobo turns on too. But it does not turn on immediately. And I think that when I am logging in to my Mac OS X 10.5 OS, that the drobo is not quite ready. (10.5 seems to boot up a lot faster for me than 10.4) I have now come to letting the computer and drive sit at the Login screen for a minute or two before I log in and the "read-only" error I was getting does not appear.
Now you have a FireWire external hard drive, are you letting it power up first before you turn on your computer? (Since I have a drobo, I have no on/off button, and only comes on when it detects the computer's USB connection) As I think this might be the key. 10.5 may be polling the attached devices too soon, before your drive (or my drobo) is ready. It's definitely a bug with Time Machine and 10.5 (as I too could access the drive in the Finder, but Time Machine didn't like it), one that may be addressed in the next update (I hope). But try this and see if letting the external drive power/spin up first, then turn on you computer, let it sit at the login screen for a minute before you go in. I hope this helps.
Before I figured this out with my drobo, I found that ejecting the drive, then using Disk Utility to do a "Repair Disk" and then re-mounting the drive fixed the problem too. But for me using a drobo via USB it took over 5-10 minutes to go through the repair. The waiting at boot method seems to work for me.
PowerMac G5 Dual 2.5Ghz
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
1TB HD, 8GB RAM, 1TB (2.15TB) drobo for Time Machine Backup
|
|
Posts:
19
Registered:
Dec 19, 2006
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Dec 28, 2007 5:19 AM
in response to: MiaMc
|
|
|
Hello all. I just started receiving this error message as well.
My external HD is a Seagate 500GB Freeagent Pro connected via USB (2.0). It has 2 partitions: a 300GB partition for TM, and a 160GB partition for media storage (500Gb doesn't really equal 500 gigabytes after all...but I digress).
Time Machine was working smoothly, until yesterday when this error popped up. So I did a "get info" on it, and my permissions area was grayed out. It says that my account can read/write, guests were read only and then there was an "unknown" account which was also read only. Now this is the first time I've seen that "unknown" account. It is a little odd.
Anyways, both partitions are read only. I'm running a verification on the TM partition at the moment, but for some reason I don't expect anything useful to come up.
I am not comfortable in the terminal, but I can follow instructions pretty well.
So does anyone have any ideas? Force a back-up? Reboot? Any serious advice will be taken into consideration 
thanks~~
MacBookPro
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
|
|
Posts:
19
Registered:
Dec 19, 2006
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Jan 3, 2008 12:35 AM
in response to: KoreanIan
|
|
|
Well to reply to myself, I verified the back-up disk, and disk utility said it was fine. So i unmounted the external, rebooted the computer, plugged external back in and everything was good to go.
Dunno why that would have worked, I'm no CS major, but it worked.
MacBookPro
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, iPod touch 16GB 1.1.2
|
|
Posts:
73
Registered:
Sep 1, 2004
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Jan 7, 2008 1:12 PM
in response to: KoreanIan
|
|
|
Good news! Go figure! Sometimes rebooting will cure a myriad of problems if you did that. I see you lost 40GB of storage somewhere? I think Seagate is formatted with FAT32 for windows, so the formatting probably took up some of the storage. Also, Seagate loads the drive with their proprietary and 'lovely' utility software which only runs on (you guessed it) Windows. You probably could have erased the entire drive of this 'garbage' before you formatted it for Mac, but I'm not sure.
I use Seagate, but made the mistake of getting only 80GB to test the waters. The drive works well, but I'm almost out of space and will have to purchase another drive or start from scratch(which I don't want to do). I wish I would have spent 100 more dollars for 500GB!
What's happening with me is I don't leave the drive connected to my laptop and forget to backup for weeks sometimes. Then the time machine application alerts me that I haven't backed up for some amount of time. When I do attach the drive and the back up starts, it 'prepares' for a very long time and the actual backup takes 'forever.' Worst of all, it backups much more GB than could possibly been added to my system.
I checked the console and it tells me time machine is doing this 'deep transversal' thing. Don't know what it is, but it's like the time machine is totally backing up system files and stuff all over again.
Well, shucks, glad yours is working.
All in all, time machine is pretty cool.
Mac OS X (10.4.2)
|
|
Posts:
1,078
Registered:
Mar 3, 2005
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Jan 7, 2008 1:23 PM
in response to: solo hans
|
|
|
I use Seagate, but made the mistake of getting only 80GB to test the waters. The drive works well, but I'm almost out of space and will have to purchase another drive or start from scratch(which I don't want to do). I wish I would have spent 100 more dollars for 500GB!
Relying on one backup is not a very good idea. You could use your 80GB drive for a bootable clone and a new, larger drive for Time Machine.
I checked the console and it tells me time machine is doing this 'deep transversal' thing. Don't know what it is, but it's like the time machine is totally backing up system files and stuff all over again.
A deep transversal means that Time Machine is re-indexing. It could be that not connecting the drive for a long period of time means that Time Machine will not consider its index to be reliable. Time Machine has the ability to fully restore the state of your hard drive from any of its backups so it does back up system files to keep track of its current state.
Mac Mini, 1.42 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 80GB HD, SuperDrive
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
Maxtor One Touch 160GB, HP LaserJet 1320n, Epson R800
|
|
Posts:
73
Registered:
Sep 1, 2004
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Jan 7, 2008 1:32 PM
in response to: Peggy Lynn
|
|
|
Relying on one backup is not a very good idea. You could use your 80GB drive for a bootable clone and a new, larger drive for Time Machine.
That's a very, very, very good suggestion! Yes, my previous iBook's HD failed and this would have helped me tremendously for troubleshooting and such.
Thanks for the other info too. You seem very knowledgeable and should be an Apple Genius.
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
|
|
Posts:
34
Registered:
Mar 12, 2007
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Jan 10, 2008 8:20 AM
in response to: MiaMc
|
|
|
i had this problem today. we have the WD Mybook 500Gb connected by ethernet to the imac and we access it through our airport extreme network. once we got it up and running there have been no problems using the mybook with time machine until today.
i won't bother describing it again because it's basically the same, the read-only message, the unknown users when i checked get info on the drive.
i got it going again with some unplugging, rebooting and reconnecting. interestingly while all this was going on i couldn't connect to the imac with my macbook using the network and the imac couldn't see the macbook either. my connection to the base station was fine all the way through.
call me paranoid but i also saw the binocular icon for remote desktop activity and in my sharing menu remote desktop was enabled and screen sharing was off - not by me, i'm sure! on one occasion that i rebooted the imac, the binoculars icon within the screen icon appeared and then disappeared when i clicked on it. is it possible i've been hacked? or could it be some weird bug? all the machines are running leopard.
also the imac's fan was running like mad when there was no particularly heavy activity going on.
that's as much as i can describe. i would be interested to know if these other things were happening to anyone else.
cheers
goatlover x
imac G5 and macbooks, ipods etc etc
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
|
|
Posts:
23
From:
St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Registered:
Aug 17, 2005
|
|
|
|
Re: Successful backup, now TM says drive is "read-only"
Posted:
Jan 12, 2008 8:06 PM
in response to: MiaMc
|
|
|
Okay everyone, I think I have found the solution, especially if you are seeing the "Unknown" user in your Get Info window's Sharing & Permissions setting for your external drive.
I had written earlier about my work-around for getting my drobo to work right after getting the "read-only" error from Time Machine. But unfortunately it was a temporary and temperamental fix. There were times then I had to eject the disk and launch Disk Utility to run a repair on the disk which would take more than half an hour on my drobo. But all the while my permissions had this "Unknown" user. Well I decided to "Go UNIX" and see if I could fix this problem once and for all.
I opened up Terminal and typed "ls -la /Volumes". This gives me a directory listing of my mounted drive volumes. I noticed that all of my drives, internal, external, USB and FireWire, all had "root" as the user and "admin" as the group, EXCEPT for my drobo! So I forced it to conform by changing it manually by typing "sudo chown root:admin /Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/".
sudo = temporarily enables root mode by asking for your password before executing.
chown = changes ownership to...
root:admin = "root" is the user and "admin" is the group.
/Volumes/Drobo\ Backup\ HD/ = My drobo drive is named "Drobo Backup HD", but UNIX sees spaces as command separators, so you have to use the "\ " to signify spaces within a name.
After doing this over a week ago, I have not had any other problems with using my drobo as a backup drive. It has never come up with the "read-only" error in Time Machine, the Sharing & Permissions setting do not have any "Unknown" users or groups, I don't even need to wait for my drobo before logging in like I did in the past. I just boot my Mac and everything with my drobo and Time Machine just works... No problems!
For me, this seems to be permanently fixed!
But please let me and the rest of us know if you try this solution, and if it works for you.
PowerMac G5 Dual 2.5Ghz
Mac OS X (10.5.1)
1TB HD, 8GB RAM, 1TB (2.15TB) drobo for Time Machine Backup
|
|
|
|
