Don’t worry, you still have the chance to recover lost data. If you format your WD external hard drive without backing up it, you will lose all files in it. Recover lost data after erasing WD external hard drive with Disk Utility Check this guide: for Mac users, wipe all data before selling old WD external hard drive. If you are going to sell, donate or dispose of your old WD external hard drive, you’d better permanently wipe all data from it. Once the process gets finished, you can write new data to your WD external hard drive without any limitation. Select the file system you want and click on Erase button again. Just open Disk Utility on your Mac, click the WD external hard drive. To solve this issue, you can use Disk Utility to format the WD external hard drive to a compatible file system.

#2 Format the WD external hard drive with Disk Utility. Before formatting it, you’d better back up important data to a safe disk.

If you want to the WD external hard drive become a compatible disk for your Mac, you have to format it to FAT/EXFAT/Mac OS Extended. Quick way to solve ‘WD external hard drive is read-only on Mac’ issue #1 Back up your WD external hard drive. How to solve this issue? Just follow the steps below. So, if your WD external hard drive is a NTFS drive, you can’t write new data to it. When you connect a NTFS disk to your Mac, you just can copy files from it to your Mac, but you can’t write new data to the disk or change anything from it. This file system is not compatible with Mac OS. NTFS is a Windows-based file system and is used widely by most of external hard drives. When you encounter this type of issue, just open Disk Utility to check if the file system of your WD external hard drive is NTFS.

When I connect my WD Drive to my MacBook Air, it gets mounted fine, I can open files and copy the data but I'm unable to delete data or move and rename the folders which are on WD Element 1TB Drive, I found out that is because my drive status is Read Only.

When I drag files from Mac desktop to my WD Elements external hard drive, nothing happens!.

When I connect it to my Mac, it can be opened, but it shows nothing.

I have a 1TB WD external hard drive and have stored 5GB documents on it.WD external hard drive read-only issues on Mac:

You also can quickly recover lost data from read-only WD external hard drive or erased WD external hard drive with Do Your Data Recovery for Mac. Summary: this guide can help you solve WD external hard drive read-only on Mac issue.

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