I need a step-by-step plan: my WD external hard drive is 'read only'

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Daphne2014 Author

Level 1

0 points

I need a step-by-step plan: my WD external hard drive is 'read only'

Hi,

I hope someone can help me, because i'm in quite a pickle. I bought a WD 500 GB external hard drive a couple of months ago. I have a MacBook Pro version OS X 10.8.5. The problem I have now is that I haven't used my external hard drive for a couple of weeks now, until today (note: I bought this hard drive and used it for the first time on my macbook pro, never on windows before or any other laptop/pc), and all of a sudden I can only 'read' my hard drive, it suddenly seemed to have changed it settings by itself to 'you can read only' whilst I never did anything to the permission settings....

So i read a couple of questions about this online, and apparently im not the only one with this problem. but all the answers i read are way too complicated for me, with too much computer jargon. Therefore i just need a simple step-by-step answer, whatever i need to install or 'configure' in order to make this thing work again!!

Please can somebody help me??? I never used this thing for more than a month and only my macbook pro....help!! It cant be that i used this hard drive once and then all of a sudden it changes it's settings??

Thanks,

Daphne

Posted on Jan 19, 2014 8:55 AM

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Answer 1

Jan 19, 2014 10:08 AM in response to Daphne2014

Try Repair Permissions on the external drive.

Connect the drive and turn it on.

Open Disk Utility on your Mac (it's in Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility).

When DU is running, select the external hard drive (on the left), click the First Aid tab, then:

1. click Repair disk, and when that is done,

2. click Repair permissions.

When both tasks are done, quit DU.

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Answer 2

Eric Root

Level 10

685,275 points

Jan 19, 2014 10:07 AM in response to Daphne2014

If you can see the hard drive in Finder, select it, do a Get Info (command - I) and see what permissions you have in Sharing and Permissions. It should be Read/Write. If it isn't, unlock the padlock, and change it. Then look towards the top to see how the drive is formatted. It normally should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

If it is not that format, go to Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. Open Disk Utility select the drive, select the erase partition, and after making sure the correct format is set, erase the drive. At the bottom the current format is shown. This will remove anything that was on the drive.

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Answer 3

Feb 13, 2017 4:40 PM in response to Daphne2014

I just had this problem today. The WD (Western Digital) drive is formatted in NTFS format and can be read on a Macbook. Without adding 3rd-party tools or editing the fstab file, you can't do this without changing the format of the drive. And you can only edit the fstab file if the drive name doesn't have a space in it. Unfortunately my WD drive has the name "My Book".

As I didn't have any data on the disk yet I decided to reformat as an exFAT drive. Formatting the disk erases all existing data.

exFAT would mean it's usable on both Windows and OS X. If you're only going to use it on a Macbook then you can format it as an OS X Extended drive. See directions here.

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Answer 4

Klaus1

Level 9

52,879 points

Feb 14, 2017 10:01 AM in response to bernfarrei

Thank you so much for repeating the information already contained in this three year old thread.

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