lifehacker external hard drive read only

Since I know that I’ll never plug this drive into a PC, I’ll choose a Mac disk format, and of those, extended journaled is your best bet. Now you can pick which format should be used when the disk is rebuilt from the list: You’ll want to click on the “Erase” option along the top after you’ve picked the drive. Click on your new drive on the list to proceed: Start it up and you’ll see all the drives listed on the left side. The program you want to accomplish this is in the Applications folder, within Utilities: Disk Utility. To fix it, the path I took was to let the Mac erase and reformat the drive, figuring that since it was empty, there’d be nothing lost and I would be confident that it was then completely compatible with my Mac systems. Dead useless as a backup device, for sure! That’s the Mac’s subtle way of saying that you can’t write to it.Ĭhose File –> Get Info… to get more details:Īgain, you can see on the bottom that it says I can only read the drive contents, not write to it. Notice the lower left corner? I’ve highlighted it: the pencil icon with the line through it. So here’s what I saw when I looked at the drive on the Mac, within the Finder: I will say that initially I too was befuddled and closely examined the hard drive itself to see if it had a “read only” switch.

I had a similar experience myself when I hooked up my new 2TB external drive to my Mac Mini server, so I can show you how I fixed the problem. In particular, it doesn’t natively support computer drives that are formatted as NTFS, the Windows NT File System, a very efficient file system designed for Windows computers that supports extremely large file sizes. While the majority of the time you should be able to just plug in any sort of external hard disk or drive, sometimes Mac OS X does get a bit picky about write permissions based on how the drive is initially formatted.

Lifehacker external hard drive read only