External Hard Drive became Read Only All of a Sudden

My external hard drive (Mac OS Extended) became read-only all of a sudden. This happened after an unsuccessful Time Machine backup from yesterday due to inadequate disk space. After I cleaned up some space and initiated a Time Machine backup manually, the drive became read-only. "Get info" shows the following. As you can see, under sharing & permissions, it says "You can only read", and there is no way for me to modify the permissions even if I click the lock on the lower right.

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I also ran first aid in disk utility and it failed with the following error code:

User uploaded file


My 1TB drive is almost full and the last thing I would want to do is erase and reformat, which would require me to buy a new external hard drive just to transfer the data. I looked everywhere online and most are solutions to drives formatted as NTFS, but mine is mac OS extended. And I'm running OS High Sierra. Please help me! Thanks!

MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS High Sierra (10.13.2)

Posted on Dec 26, 2017 10:45 AM

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External Hard Drive became Read Only All of a Sudden

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