External Hard Drive stuck on Read Only

Hi and Welcome to Apple Discussions ...

Have you tried connecting the external drive to the Mac, then when the drive mounts, select it, then click Command + I on your keyboard. A window will open. Click Ownership & Permissions. Where it says: Details/Owner, click the gold lock icon, you will be prompted for your admin password. Now, click Owner. Click the pop up menu just beside Owner. Go to the top of that list and select the Admins name/account. The Read/Write button beside "You can" should now be availalbe to set to:
Read & Write. Close that window.

Run Disk Utility located in Applications/Utilities and Repair Disk Permissions.

Reboot. Reconnect the external drive and see if you it's possible to edit anything on the drive.

As far as Windows Vista security settings are concerned, have you tried using the Control Panel/Updates? Might get some assistance there.

Carolyn 🙂

I think Windows Vista uses NTFS formatting. According to this document

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75320\
(toward the bottom)

NTFS formatted disks are read-only under Mac OS X. To make it writable on a Mac and a PC, you'll have to use FAT32 or FAT16 as the Windows format.

Indeed, if the disk was reformatted (possibly by the first person who used it) Vista is set to format to NTFS by default. In this case, you will not be able to write to the disk.

If you want to be able to write to the disk, you should pull all your important information off of it and onto the Mac's hard drive (if possible). Then click the smiley (Finder) and go to *Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility* Locate the volume of the hard drive in question in the pane on the left, it will be the second hard drive, slightly below the hard drive. The Format: listed toward the bottom of the window will tell you whether or not the drive is NTFS. If it is, go to the erase tab and Set the Volume Format to either Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or MS-DOS File System.

MS-DOS formatting will allow the drive to be read and written to by both PC and Mac, but the Mac will not be able to read or write from this format as quickly as it can in disks that are it's own Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.

*It's recommended, for performance and integrity, that you format the drive with Mac OS Extended (Journaled).* This type of disk will be readable on a PC without third party software, but only with third party software. If you're going to capture or play video off of this drive, then don't even consider the MS-DOS format.

If you can't see the option for MS-DOS, make sure you're selecting the drive itself, it should be just above the drive you selected and should start with a number followed by GB and a manufacturer name.

Also, realize that FireWire is faster than USB 2.0, in case this drive has both, use FireWire and not USB 2.0 (for improved performance in either format).

By the way, welcome to the world of Mac, you will see it truly is a community.

Perhaps there is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution available. I can't think of a good way to do this without such a solution. Through my own experimentation, there doesn't seem to be any good way to share external drives connected to Macs with Windows computers (using XP, I'm not sure about Vista). Although the Macs don't have any problem sharing video off their external drives with each other.

This is a Dilemma, MS-DOS formatting allows for a maximum file size of 4 GB and the performance is poor, but Mac OS format can only be read with a Mac or with third party software on a Windows machine. I'm not sure what file formats NAS systems would use or with whom they could share, but it occurs to me that there might not be a solution with zero compromise. Perhaps we have just discovered why most video editing firms use Macs exclusively.

I don't know exactly how NAS works, but why don't you just connect it directly to either the Mac or PC, and format it for that computer. If it's on the Mac (format for Mac); you can use Windows Sharing to allow the PC to "map network drive." If it's on the PC (format for PC); do the opposite. Connection over the network will be limited by the network speed, just like the NAS drive. But as least one of the two computers will access the drive at direct connect speed.