On imac Ext-Hard drive suddenly will only read! How can I make it read/write again?

DrFroggies

Hi folks,

I'm working with a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 320gb External Hard Drive on the imacs here at my university. I have it formatted to ExFAT so that I could use it with my pc as well but I've never had to so far so it's only ever been used on the uni imacs.

It's been fine for working on media projects until suddenly when i came back to uni after the Christmas break I went to continue working on a film project and realised the external hard drive now said read only??

One thing I did was to put all of my work from last semester (which is everything that was on the hard drive into a single folder) could that have caused the problem?

And does anyone know how i can reset my permissions to read/write without causing damage or risk to the files on the hard-drive as I can't clear the disk (i have no where else to store the 185gb of video footage).

I'd really appreciate it if anyone could tell me how i can fix it? I know how to do all of this on my pc but i've no idea with the mac as i only use it for my media projects here in the university.

Thanks!

DrF ;-)

Ps. I've also put this question up on the apple support forum as I'm really hoping to get this sorted as soon as possible.

GreenWolfe

Was the drive unmounted improperly at any stage? It might be marked readonly because the filesystem is marked as dirty. If you haven't performed a file system check (chkdsk or fsck depending on what you're using it on), do that and try again.

DrFroggies

EarthlyPangaea wrote: »

Was the drive unmounted improperly at any stage? It might be marked readonly because the filesystem is marked as dirty. If you haven't performed a file system check (chkdsk or fsck depending on what you're using it on), do that and try again.

Thanks EarthlyPangaea...how would i do the chkdsk or fsck on an imac?

Apologies if that sounds like a silly question but I find the macs pretty confusing in terms of navigating in the way i would intuitively do with a pc.

GreenWolfe

DrFroggies wrote: »

Thanks EarthlyPangaea...how would i do the chkdsk or fsck on an imac?

Apologies if that sounds like a silly question but I find the macs pretty confusing in terms of navigating in the way i would intuitively do with a pc.

I'm not much of a Mac guy, but a quick google suggests either using Disk Utility or dropping to a terminal and executing the following commands:

diskutil -list
sudo fsck_exfat /dev/diskX

The first one will let you find out which is your external HDD (it should look like /dev/diskX, where X is a number - put the correct drive into the next command), and the second one will scan the HDD.

GreenWolfe

FYI OP, I've been having similar problems with an exFAT formatted flash drive in the last few days under Linux, and the developer of that particular software package said that my flash drive was dying. Because fsck doesn't do any write tests, it wouldn't tell you whether your drive was having problems.

Just in case you should make backups ASAP.

DrFroggies

Yikes! Thanks for the heads up...hopefully that's not the situation with my harddrive as I have nothing to back this stuff on (usually would back up but just have no where to do put it at moment):(

Thanks again!

riclad

Try it on another pc, my laptop win7 ,external drive 500gig, is read only,or write,to, eg no delete possible.
on my pc win7 hp, it works ,read,write,,delete.
I presume its a software problem,on my laptop, other 3 external drives work fine.its in ntfs file format.

DrFroggies

riclad wrote: »

Try it on another pc, my laptop win7 ,external drive 500gig, is read only,or write,to, eg no delete possible.
on my pc win7 hp, it works ,read,write,,delete.
I presume its a software problem,on my laptop, other 3 external drives work fine.its in ntfs file format.

Cheers riclad my format is actually ExFat and i'm using it on the uni macs. But I'll keep in mine what you said because that does seem odd that your external h'drive works on one pc but not another.

ZENER

If you can read the drive can't you copy the folder to another drive then reformat it ?

You could try to Repair Disk Permissions or Repair Disk in /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. As mentioned above it sounds like the file system is "dirty". Would be worth copying important data to another drive beforehand though, just in case.

Ken