Written by
Amanda Wong
Summary: This post guides you through the detailed steps to unlock a drive on your Mac, and it also tells how to decrypt a hard drive, you can follow this post to unlock or decrypt an SSD/HDD/SD card/USB drive on Mac with ease.
Perhaps, when you want to access the drive on your Mac, but only to find it locked, preventing you from using the drive normally. Such a situation could occur to an HDD, SSD, USB flash drive, SD card, etc., and the reasons are various. From this post, we will explain why the disk is locked on your Mac, and provide workable solutions to unlock a drive on Mac.
What does it mean when a disk is locked on Mac?
A locked drive typically means that the drive is secured in some way, and you can't get full read-and-write access to the drive, generally, a locked drive is usually caused by:
- Because the drive is encrypted, you cannot access it in any way until the disk has been decrypted.
- You are unable to add or remove files because the disk has been set with read-only permissions.
- MacOS does not completely support the file system that the hard drive uses. For instance, the operating system can't write to an NTFS-formatted disk; it can only read its data.
In all three situations, you cannot use the hard drive on your Mac until the problem is fixed. This is an issue that can arise with any external storage device, even the top-rated SSDs and Mac storage drives.
Let others who are troubled with the same issue know the possible causes!
How to unlock a drive on Mac step-by-step?
As we have explained why your drive is locked on Mac, you can troubleshoot this issue by examining the following possible causes. Just follow our detailed steps below to unlock a drive on a Mac. After that, you can use the external SSD/HDD/SD card/USB drive as normal.
Decrypt the drive to unlock
If you've set up FileVault encryption on your Mac, the system will prompt you to enter your login password (which can be the admin password) when you boot up the Mac. Once you enter the password, it will decrypt the disk and allow access to the system. If you enable the option to allow iCloud to unlock FileVault, the Mac might automatically unlock the disk if you have your Apple ID linked. However, generally, the admin password is required for the first decryption upon boot-up.
If you encrypt the external drive on a Mac via Finder while setting up the Time Machine drive or when erasing it in the Disk utility, you'll be prompted to enter the password for the encrypted drive. Once the correct password is entered, the drive will unlock, and you can access the files on it like any other external storage. Otherwise, the volume won't mount in Disk Utility and won't show up in Finder, and you can't access it.
In case it is a BitLocker-encrypted drive, it is not supported by macOS. By default, the BitLocker drive will not be recognized on your Mac and the error "The Disk you attached was not readable by this computer" will prompt. Then, a third-party BitLocker for Mac such as iBoysoft BitLocker for Mac enables you to unlock and use the drive.
Here's how to open BitLocker drive on Mac with iBoysoft BitLocker for Mac:
- Free download iBoysoft BitLocker for Mac on your device. You need to enable system extension on an Apple Silicon Mac and grant the software Full Disk Access if required.
- Connect the BitLocker-encrypted drive to the Mac.
- Open iBoysoft BitLocker for Mac.
- On the app's main interface, enter the BitLocker password or recovery key to unlock the drive for access.
Change drive permissions
Sometimes, the disk is locked on the Mac because of incorrect drive permission settings. If the drive is set to be read-only for the current user account, then you are unable to access the drive for writing operations. You can follow the steps below to check and change permissions on the external hard drive on Mac:
- Plug in your external hard drive to the Mac using the appropriate cable.
- In Finder, right-click (or Control-click) on the external hard drive's icon.
- Select "Get Info" from the context menu. This opens a window that shows detailed information about the drive, including its size, format, and permissions.
- In the Get Info window, scroll down to the Sharing & Permissions section. If the section is locked (you'll see a small padlock icon), click on the padlock. You will need to enter an administrator password to make changes.
- After unlocking the padlock, you will see a list of users and their access levels. Ensure the privilege is Read & Write next to your user account.
- Check the box next to "Ignore ownership on this volume" if available.
Gain NTFS write support
Perhaps, the external hard drive is formatted as NTFS, a Windows-exclusive file system, then the drive is read-only on a macOS device. To unlock the NTFS drive on Mac to make it readable and writable, you can choose an NTFS driver for Mac or reformat it.
If you need to keep the data on the NTFS drive, then you can try NTFS for Mac software such as iBoysoft NTFS for Mac, it automatically mounts the NTFS drive on Mac in read-write mode, so that you can access the NTFS drive on Mac without any limitations.
Steps to use NTFS drive on Mac with iBoysoft NTFS for Mac:
- Free download and install iBoysoft NTFS for Mac.
- Connect the NTFS drive to your Mac.
- Launch iBoysoft NTFS for Mac, it will mount the NTFS drive, and then you can open it to read and write.
If there is no important data on that locked disk on Mac, you can directly format the drive for Mac to make it usable again. This is a more straightforward solution to unlock the drive on Mac. Besides, this also helps when you forget the drive password and need to make the drive usable again.
Have you got the drive unlocked? Share the method that works!
