Usually, you can read and write to files on an external hard drive on your Mac.But there are chances that this external hard drive shows read-only on Mac.When you check its disk information, you will find you can only read the external hard drive on Mac.Moreover, users who use USB flash drives and SD cards on Mac also encounter this read-only problem.
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There are many different kinds of file systems, and each one has different structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size, etc.
By default, Windows uses Microsoft NTFS file system while Macs use HFS and APFS for OS volume.
FAT32 and exFAT are usable for both Windows and Mac operating systems.
And when you open files on this external hard drive, you will find your documents being read-only.
For an NTFS file system SD card on Mac, files like photos are locked as you can only read them.
You will see an obvious Windows NT File System in the right column.
Try to repair the read-only external hard drive with or without formatting.
The reason is, as you may know, formatting a hard disk will wipe your data out of this drive and cause data loss.
Its a menu bar app, from which users can mount, repair, erase NTFS hard drives, external hard drives, SD cards, USB flash drives, etc.
However, it is not recommended as it is not stable and could result in data loss if it goes wrong.
Meanwhile, do not use this method if you are not familiar with the command line, in case that you input a wrong command and cause unexpected damage to your Mac and drives.
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To formatting this read-only hard drive, you can just go to Disk Utility and Erase it.
Therefore, you can choose HFS if you are going to use this external hard drive on macOS Sierra and earlier Mac operating systems.
Adobe animate mac torrentThus, if the permissions are changed by you or others, a message will pop up and inform you that the file is read-only or you dont have permission to save when you save changes to this disk.
Here below are steps to ignore the permission on external hard drives.
Scarface the fix zippyshareWhen this happens, your drive will be only mounted in read-only mode to prevent the data on it from corruption.
You can use the following guide to fix read-only external hard drive in Disk Utility without formatting.
On the contrary, some other reasons make your disk not writable.
For instance, if your disk becomes read-only after a macOS update, you may be facing one of the rare glitches of a macOS.