Home > Questions

USB Flash Drive Read-only But Has Spotlight Folder

My FAT32 formatted USB flash drive stores some photos. I left it connected to my MacBook Pro via a USB Hub for about a week. After that, the USB becomes 'read-only' both on my Mac and on my friend's PC. It has a ".Spotlight-V100" folder, which means it was writable before. It shows "read-only file system" on my Mac and shows "The hardware is write protected" on the PC. I think that the system possibly crashed when the drive was connected. Is there a way to make the USB drive writable again? Please help me.

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Connie Yang

Connie Yang

Answered on Tuesday, August 27, 2024

You can right-click the USB drive and select "Get Info" to see your permission to the drive. If it shows "read-only" under the permissions section, click the lock to unlock it with your admin account and then change the permission to the USB to "read & write".

If you can't change your permission to the USB in Get Info, check if it is caused by your USB hub. You can disconnect the USB hub from your Mac and directly connect the USB drive to your Mac to see if this issue results from the faulty USB hub.

Still no luck? I think that your USB drive probably has some errors. You can move all files from the drive to your Mac and then reformat the drive. If you even can't access the USB drive now, you can use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to rescue the files from the corrupted disk first and then reformat it in Disk Utility.

 

People Also Ask

Read More Questions

Read More Advice From iBoysoft's Computer Experts

how to enable ntfs write on mac

Enable NTFS Write Support on Mac Sequoia and Earlier

This post provides multiple ways to gain NTFS write permission on Mac running macOS Sequoia and ealier. After reading, you will know how to enable NTFS write support on Mac.

NTFS for Mac Tips

macOS Sequoia NTFS write acess required

How to Enable NTFS Write Support for macOS Sequoia? [3 Ways]

This article introduces three ways to get macOS Sequoia NTFS read/write support on Mac and one possible free NTFS for Mac Sequoia driver.

NTFS for Mac Tips

Does NTFS work on Mac

Does NTFS Work on Mac? Read/Write NTFS on Mac

Does NTFS work on Mac? Here are the answers and three ways to read and write to NTFS on Mac without losing data.

NTFS for Mac Tips