Q: Change permissions on external HD connected via Seagate Central NAS device
Hi
I have recently bought a 2TB Seagate Central NAS device (model SRN01C), which is connected to our home network wirelessly via an AirPort Express base station (via Ethernet). We are using it as a media server so everyone in the family can access movies, photos and music. It also doubles as our Time Machine backup disk. I am using a MacBook Air running 10.9.5.
As a precaution for when the Seagate drive eventually fails, I want to manually create second backup of the files on a Western Digital MyBook external HD.
The Seagate Central has a USB 2 port, which allows the WD HD to be directly connected to it.
When I mount the Seagate Central (SC), I can see the WD HD in the Finder, but I cannot copy anything from the SC to the WD HD. I get an error message saying that I do not have permission. If I use Get Info on the WD HD to try and change permissions, it says I do not have permission to change them to read/write.
Some detail...
When I mount the WD HD, although it only has one partition (seen in Disk Utility) it appears as 2 shares: "usb - share 1" and "usb - share 2" (or something like that).
"usb - share 1" looks to be a volume that is required by the system for some reason. It is only 5kb in size.
If I click on "usb - share 1", it has full R/W permissions (777), but of course nothing can be copied there because it is too small.
"usb - share 2" is the main "partition" (999GB), but the permissions for this are Read Only for all users (555).
I have tried reformatting the WD HD using different formats (Mac OS Journaled; ExFAT) and partitions (2 instead of 1), etc, but to no avail.
I would be grateful if anyone could provide instructions as to how I can change permissions on the WD HD so that I can copy the files on the SC to it. I have used Macs for years, but I am very unfamiliar with changing permissions, so I would appreciate it if you could explain it to me as you would to a 4-year-old.
Thanks for your help.
MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2014), OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Posted on May 26, 2016 7:09 AM