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I am trying to save some important files from my faulty internal hard drive on my iMac. I am in the Internet Recovery mode and running the terminal. I also have connected an external 1TB storage and I can view the files inside it using the terminal. However, I cannot seem to write anything on the external drive as I get the message
cp: volumes/seagatedrive/backup.dmg: Read-only file system
I have used the chmod 777 command for my seagatedrive to no avail. The message I get there is:
Unable to change file mode on volumes/seagatedrive: Read-only file system
How can I make my external hard drive (seagatedrive above) writable?
Would appreciate any help.
876
The cause of the "Read Only" behavior is due to the format of the file system. Many storage devices such as USB drives and external hard disk drives come pre-formatted in NTFS because a larger number of consumers are using them on PCs.
If you can't copy files to external hard drive and it's frozen, there is an off-chance that the drive is improperly formatted or something is wrong with the drive's software aspect. You can fix it by reformatting the drive to NTFS.
Select the drive in the Finder. Press Command-I to display the Get Info window. At the bottom of the window, click the arrow next to Sharing & Permissions to display permissions. Click on the Privilege menu next to your username and choose Read & Write.
OP has stated, that his drive is formatted as NTFS. therefore you'll need to setup thirdparty drivers to support write-access on that drive. An article about that can be found here: http://www.howtogeek.com/236055/how-to-write-to-ntfs-drives-on-a-mac/
[...] Mac OS X can read from NTFS drives, but it can’t write to them unless you use one of the below tricks. We highly recommend paying for a third-party NTFS driver if you need to do this as the other solutions don’t work as well and are more work to set up.[...]
Alternatively you should consider using exFAT as drive Format. Using exFAT has the advantage of compatibility on almost all Platforms.
Since I can't put my thoughts in a comment (not enough rep. yet) here is what you can check.
osx behaves strangely with external drives which aren't formatted in Mac OS Format.
if this all fails you could also check, if root has the proper rights to do these previous things. if so, there might be a problem with your account or privileges on that account.
if there won't be anyone being able to help you, you should try and ask your question on https://unix.stackexchange.com/
cheers and good luck
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