How to Change Permissions on External Hard Drive Mac Without Formatting?

3 Quick Ways to Solve Mac External Hard Drive "Read Only"

Open the Finder and find your external hard drive in the left sidebar.
Rightclick on this drive or volume and choose Get info, and then scroll down to Sharing & Permissions.

How do I Change Sharing and Permissions on Mac External Drive Without Formatting?

Connect your External Hard drive to Mac.
Rightclick the drives icon on your desktop.
Choose "Get Info" to see details about the drive.
Click the golden padlock if it appears locked, and then enter your Mac administrator password to unlock the permissions settings for the drive.

How do I Change Custom Access to an External Hard Drive Mac?

Click the dropdown menu beside the account name or group whose permissions you want to change and then select the privilege you want to give them. For example, if you want all users and administrators to have read and write access to the external hard drive, youd give "Read & Write" permissions to the "staff" group.

How do I Change my Hard Drive from Read only on Mac Without Erasing?

Step 1: Launch " Disk Utility ".
Step 2: In the list of available drives on the left, choose the problematic external hard drive.
Step 3: Choose a proper file system and rename your hard disk.
Step 4: Click Erase to reformatting your external hard drive.

How do I Change Permissions on an External Hard Drive Mac Terminal?

Select a file, folder or application in Finder.
Select Get Info (CMD + I) and inspect the Sharing & Permissions section at the bottom of the Info panel.
Add or delete user names (under the Name column) and choose the permissions you want (under the Privilege column)