Hard drive locked and inaccessible "read-only file system"

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Level 1

57 points

Hard drive locked and inaccessible "read-only file system"

The internal hard drive on my old MacBook is failing and I have been locked out of it.

disk utility couldn’t repair it.

I’m starting up from an external Leopard USB drive andThe internal drive does mount but as read-only, and my internal home folder is inaccessible (permissions) even though I am using the same user name and password for my account.

Because the drive is locked I can’t change the user permissions for my internal home folder.

I tried: sudo chflags 0 /Volumes/MacBook\ HD

It returned: Read-only file system

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

MacBook, OS X 10.11

Posted on Apr 21, 2020 2:01 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

245,189 points

Apr 21, 2020 11:27 AM in response to Hilal Malawi

See if you can copy what you need off to another drive...

Download CCC 3.4.7 for use on Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5). CCC 3.4.7 and 3.5.7 are provided as-is; we regret that we cannot offer any support for the installation or use of these older versions of CCC.

https://bombich.com/download

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Answer 2

Hilal Malawi Author

Level 1

57 points

Apr 27, 2020 10:47 AM in response to BDAqua

BDAqua’s suggestion solved the problem for me.

Using CCC running from the Leopard USB, I cloned my home folder to an external FireWire hard drive. It took more than 21 hours, but the file permissions of the cloned folders recognized my user name and password, and I was able to access all their contents.

Of course it requires having a spare hard disk.

Thank you BDAqua; I greatly appreciate it.

(Edit: darn, I tagged the wrong post with “Solved” and I can’t change that)

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