Suddenly, I found that I no longer had permission to write to any of my own Mac OS Journaled hard drives. (I tried four of them to no avail.) Within the permissions tab in Get Info, I am listed as the owner who can read and write to them, and “Ignore Ownership on this Volume” is selected. If I try to set “everyone” with read and write permission, it says I do not have permission to do that. I have run First Aid on all drives in Disk Utility, no error hint. I have tried plugging the drives directly into the Mac Mini, and it does not work either. I have re-installed Mac OS Monterey 12.2.1 and it still does not allow me to change the device permissions. If I restart the computer, the drives show up properly for a few seconds (showing available space), but after Finder lists it on the sidebar, my permissions are once again removed. Why? Can anyone give me some suggestions?
It is so strange that all your external hard drives are not writable on your Mac. It looks like either some third-party app blocks you from writing to your external hard drives or the system has certain bugs. Try to boot your Mac into Safe Mode and then check if you can write to your Mac OS Journaled external hard drives.
You say that as the owner of the Mac and your external hard drives, you can’t change permissions on the external hard drives on your Mac. I think you must have turned on certain protection software to stop your hard drives from being written to. Check your recently installed apps and uninstall the suspicious ones.