Despite the fact that I am the only one who uses my Macbook and I’m the only one with Administrator permissions, it’s telling me that I don’t have the necessary permissions to change the “Sharing and Permissions” of an external drive and even though it’s showing that I have both read and write privileges, it’s only giving me read privileges.
Hello, laffey_!
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities, it's great to have you here. We want to help you get this permissions issue sorted out so you can manage all of your external drives seamlessly.
The first thing that we recommend is that you make sure your Mac is running the latest version of macOS available. You can do that from System Preferences > Software Update. Updates introduce new features but they can also include bug fixes and enhancements that may resolve these types of issues. Once you're all up to date, go ahead and test the issue again and see if you have better luck.
If not (or if you're already up to date) then another good troubleshooting step is booting your Mac into Safe Mode and seeing if you're able to have read & write access there. Booting into Safe Mode can help isolate issues and give us some more information and oftentimes will resolve the issue in and of itself. Here's how to do that: Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
We hope this does the trick for you!
Cheers.
Hello laffy_,
Thank you for getting back to us with your results. The best thing to do at this time, is to get in touch with Apple directly for further assistance at: Apple Support
Cheers!
Hi Nathan, thanks for responding, I did both of the things you recommend but neither of them did the trick as my Mac was already on the latest update and booting into safe mode didn't change anything. If you have any other ideas of how to fix this I would gladly appreciate it.
I am the administrator of my MacBook but it says I don’t have the necessary permissions to do something.
