My external hard drive is mounted as "read-only". I've adjusted the permissions for individual folders but I get a message that I don't have permission to change the drive permissions because it's mounted as a read-only
iMac 24″, macOS 15.1
HWTech wrote:
Excellent suggestions by @Barney-15E.
If the drive is using the NTFS file system, then the built-in macOS NTFS driver only supports reading from the NTFS volume. A third party NTFS driver is needed to write to such a volume.
Doh. I can’t believe I forgot that.
HWTech wrote:
Excellent suggestions by @Barney-15E.
If the drive is using the NTFS file system, then the built-in macOS NTFS driver only supports reading from the NTFS volume. A third party NTFS driver is needed to write to such a volume.
Doh. I can’t believe I forgot that.
Excellent suggestions by @Barney-15E.
If the drive is using the NTFS file system, then the built-in macOS NTFS driver only supports reading from the NTFS volume. A third party NTFS driver is needed to write to such a volume.
Anti-virus apps, cleaning/optimizer apps, or third party security software can also modify the normal operation of macOS and your drive.
For an HFS+ or APFS external drive you should make sure that "Ownership" is ignored unless that external drive is also a macOS boot drive, then do not touch that setting or your external drive may no longer boot or function properly.
If you don’t have permission to use files on a Mac disk - Apple Support
I've heard some drive controllers will disable write when they sense failure. I think I've only heard of that with Flash-based media, though.
Try running First Aid on it in Disk Utility. You can also eject it and mount it in Disk Utility to see if that changes anything.
How to change mount point from read-only to read/write
