Again, this is an irritating prospect as you have paid for one hard drive, and you don’t want to pay for a second just because the first one is having problems. Of course, if you have files on it already, that really isn’t an option, as you would lose all of those files.Īnother suggestion you’ll find is to create a second backup of your read-only external hard drive and then reformat the read-only had drive. That’s the suggestion the Seagate forum support admin offers. The first thing you will run across when you search for a read-only external hard drive on a Mac is the suggestion to reformat it. Since Seagate is one of the most popular brands you will find when searching for a backup external hard drive for a Mac on sites like Amazon, we’ll troubleshoot this problem based on one of their hard drives. Troubleshooting a Read-Only Seagate External Hard Drive No matter the reason why, this can be a very frustrating thing to deal with, especially if you have just backed up a large amount of files onto your new drive. It can also happen if you are switching between using the drive on a Mac and a Windows PC. In some cases, you don’t even need to eject it improperly for this to happen – it just happens from one usage to the next. If you see this at the very bottom under Sharing & Permissions, then you have a problem. If you’re having trouble copying a file to your external hard drive, right click on it in your Finder and select Get Info.

Instead, you’ll now have a read-only external hard drive that won’t allow you to do backups. Usually, you just get a quick warning message and things return to normal.īut sometimes, something worse will happen. But sometimes, things happen that can really turn that ease of use into “What do I do with this?” One of those things is when you unplug a USB storage device without ejecting it properly. Mac computers are easy to use, for the most part. Need help with your computer? At Boxaid remote computer repair we can help you with Windows or Mac problems such as slow performance or virus removal service at an affordable price.

External hard drive read only mac