I upgraded to El Capitan and now my external hard drive is locked and I can't discover any way to unlock it. My files on that drive are now read only.
iMac (20-inch Mid 2007), OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
have you opened the "get info" box and gone to the bottom to look at permissions?
right click and get info
Grant
More than likely you installed the drive manufacturers crappy software which allowed you to write to an NTFS drive. Get Info and look at the format in the top part of the window.
If it is NTFS, then you have three options,
No. 3 is the best choice and what the drive manufacturer should have told you to do instead of install their crapware.
You never need driver software to use a hard drive except for some very special cases.
In addition to not having to wait for updates to use your hard drive, you can actually back up that drive using Time Machine.
Grant: it won't even show the permissions. It just says "You can only read"
That's odd - Barney below may be correct. Let's begin with - when you attached the new drive did you open disk utility and format it in the proper format?
if not, you have no idea what you have and should thank someone that it works at all ......
I expect it was formatted wrong. Back up all the files and start over.
Grant
Thanks for the information. This is what comes up in Get info: Windows NT File System (NTFS). I am able to copy the contents to another drive, so I will do that and try to reformat the drive. If not successful, I will certainly buy one that works with the Mac OS. Funny thing is that this drive worked for over a year until
I installed El Capitan.
Cheers,
Fishmeal
Funny thing is that this drive worked for over a year until
I installed El Capitan.
As I stated, it worked because you installed the software that came on the drive. OS X can read NTFS, but it needs a third-party system modification to allow it to write. There is no way that you could have written o the drive without that software.
The software broke when you installed El Capitan because it was crapware. They should have updated the software prior to El Capitan's release.
All the drives will likely say they work with OS X, but you will need to reformat them for your Mac as they will likely be formatted for Windows.
Yup NTFS is Windows file system.
1 back up files
2 open disk utility
3 format HFS - GUID map, HFS+ Journaled
Make sure you remove whatever stupid software they gave you with that drive.
Should be simple and you'll be good to go.
Grant
Grant makes a good point about uninstalling that software. In some cases it prevented the drive from mounting.
I copied everything off the drive and reformatted it, put everything back on and all is now fine. Thanks for the help, Barney and Grant!
Fishmeal
glad it all worked out.
How to unlock external hard drive?
