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drtune Author

Level 1

8 points

User-related permissions gone awry

I have just upgraded my OS to High Sierra (from Mavericks). Now one of my external hard drives has suddenly become "read only". I contacted the manufacturer of the EHD and they said "check the user related permissions since the error you are getting is related to the user's profile which is part of your operating system". My permissions on the EHD say "read & write", but this isn't being recognised. Can this be fixed so I can copy to my EHD again?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013)

Posted on Aug 25, 2018 3:02 AM

Best reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,944 points

Posted on Aug 25, 2018 4:32 AM

How is the external drive formatted? Select it in Finder and Get Info. It will state the format in the info at the top.

If NTFS, that is normal. macOS has never been able to write to NTFS without third-party software (kernel extensions).

If it is in a Mac format, is "Ignore ownership on volume" checked?

If unchecked, do you need user access control on the drive? If not, check the box to ignore ownership.

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User-related permissions gone awry

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