Home > Questions

Can't write to the external hard drive on my new Mac

Monterey 12.0.1 was pre-installed on my brand-new 16" MacBook Pro. My older Catalina MacBook Pros allowed me to utilize an external NTFS disk for years, but I'm unable to build a directory on it on the new Mac. Permissions and Sharing display brianthomas (me) as Read & Write, staff as Read Only, and everyone else as Read Only. My attempt is to modify the Read Only setting to Read & Write for Staff and Everyone after I have unlocked the padlock. "Operation can't be completed...don't have necessary permissions." The Staff and Everyone users for the external disk cannot be changed to Read & Write even after I execute the CSRUTIL command in recovery mode and restart normally. Has this even got to be something I do?

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Amanda Wong

Amanda Wong

Answered on Friday, June 14, 2024

As the external hard drive is formatted with NTFS, and you have already installed the Tuxera NTFS driver for years on your old MacBook Pro, you can read and write to the NTFS drive on the old Mac without any limitations. However, there is no such NTFS for Mac driver on the new MacBook Pro, thus, you find yourself unable to create a directory on the drive using the new Mac.

NTFS is not supported by macOS even on recent macOS versions. Thus, you need to fix the issue by installing an NTFS driver for Mac on your new MacBook Pro to read and write the NTFS drive. iBoysoft NTFS for Mac is a good choice, it always keeps updated to support the latest macOS and quickly mounts the NTFS drive on Mac in read-write mode.

To change the permission on the external hard drive on Mac, you should be logged in as the admin, but you can't enable NTFS write support by changing the sharing and permission settings, only a third-party NTFS driver for Mac can help.