Select APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) alongside the format option.On the pop-up dialog box, type the name of the formatting drive.Select the external drive from the sidebar and click the Erase tab.Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.If the external hard drive is in NTFS format, erasing it to a macOS compatible file system format should fix the read-only issue.Įrase the external storage drive, as follows: Warning: Back up the files on the Mac external hard drive before erasing it.
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How to Resolve Mac External Hard Drive Read-Only Error?
So, what might be the reasons behind this read-only state? The following section describes in detail. If the drive is in read-only state, then you can only read data from the drive, but cannot write data on to it.