My Book Essentials 3 TB is READ ONLY!

[nucleus33]

Hi, Western Digital seems to have goofy software - this one mounts but I have read only permission and cannot change the permission.  Disk Utility and DiskWarrior error out when I attempt to erase.  

I run OS X 10.7.4 on a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Imac with 3 GB of RAM

What is it with WD and their silly software?  Just sell us the HD without all the BS software please!

[Joe_S]

If the drive is formatted NTFS for Windows it will be read only on a Mac.

Joe

[nucleus33 · Accepted solution]

Wow.  Western Digital has pretty bad documentation.  This is a very simple solution to the problem of Read Only Permission on Western Digital External HD My Book Essentials on Mac OS X:

What did NOT work:

Formatting partitioning the drive from Disk Utility or DiskWarrior

Installing NTFS drivers from here:   http://mac-free.com/download/NTFS-3G.html

Using the WD Quick Formatter as installed on the Western Digital External HD from the factory

Restarting, restarting in Safe Mode, zapping the P Ram, etc.

What DID work:

I moved the WD WD Quick Formatter onto the internal HD in my iMac and then ran that copy to reformatt the External My Book Essentials HD.  

Problem fixed, and a very easy solution.

[skyhigh2571]

this problem cost me 1 year worth a work. I had the drive hooked up and the permission thing was driving me to the point of smashing it. I finally got to reformat it and somehow I clicked or the computer clicked on my backup drive and reformattedthe wrong drive with 15 years of work. Luckily I had a year old backup so I only lost a year worth of work.  I almost killed myself since it was 1000s of hours of stuff that I would have to do for free for my clients. Something so easy.

"Plug it in and Use" yea right. I am sick of technology companies costing me money and time with no retribution. They are billionaires and I am pennyless losing money trying to figure out "technology a monkey could use"

[Wayne]

you did two things wrong:

1.  you clicked on the wrong drive to format.  the computer had nothing to do with it.

2.  you failed to have a year's worth of data backed up.  that's your responsibility.

by the way, if monkeys could use this technology, they probably wouldn't.  

[lenoaz]

I need help and it seems this may be the right thread. My WD Essential drive has been used for my Time Machine Backup drive for the past year. 1TB and not even close to being full and I was able to access files on the disk and all was working fine. Until about a week ago when i started receiving a Time Machine Backup error stating the drive was "Read Only". Now it won't even show the disk. What can I do? Thanks in advance for the help.