By Katrina | Posted to NTFS for Mac Tips, updated on November 19th, 2020 |

How To Determine The Memory Lft On A My Passport For Mac Hard Drive Not Working
How To Determine The Memory Lft On A My Passport For Mac Hard Drive Western Digital

Every journey needs a passport. The My Passport for Mac drive is trusted, portable storage that perfectly complements your on-the-go lifestyle. Compatible with USB-C and USB-A, the My Passport for Mac drive comes equipped to connect with today's latest technology.
Hello and welcome to the WD community. If you press the ctrl key on your keyboard and click on the drive icon, you will be able to see get info. There, you will be able to see the space available on the device, hope this helps.
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You can try below actions to determine if the WD My Passport external hard drive is mounting on your Mac: 1. Connect the WD My Passport to your system, 2. Wait for the drive to appear in the Finder and Desktop. Note: If the WD gives no response after getting connected with the Mac then go to Finder.

External hard drives are important storage media for both Mac and Windows users. Usually, you can read and write to files on an external hard drive on your Mac. But there are chances that this external hard drive shows read-only on Mac.

You may be wondering why you can't write to this external hard drive even though you are the owner of this disk, and more importantly, if you can fix this read-only problem without formatting or not?

Step 4 Once the scan is complete, you can preview the files found from your WD My passport external hard drive. All files found through the scan will be displayed in the left panel, you can easily view them with 'Tree-View' or 'Files-View' (the files are organized by different filetypes), or you can even apply filters to the found files to help.

There are mainly three causes for this issue:

The read-only external hard drive is NTFS file system
You only have read permission to this external hard drive
You can't write to external hard drives on Mac due to disk corruption

For example, many people have reported that their WD My Passport external hard drives are read-only on Mac. When you check its disk information, you will find you can only read the external hard drive on Mac. Moreover, users who use USB flash drives and SD cards on Mac also encounter this read-only problem.

Thus, this post will analyze three external hard drive read-only cases so that you can find a relevant and feasible solution to your problem.

Case 1: The read-only external hard drive is NTFS file system

A file system controls how data is stored and retrieved on a disk. There are many different kinds of file systems, and each one has different structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size, etc. By default, Windows uses Microsoft NTFS file system while Macs use HFS+ and APFS for OS volume. FAT32 and exFAT are usable for both Windows and Mac operating systems.

That's to say, you are unable to write to NTFS drives on macOS Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, and any earlier Mac operating systems.

If you try to copy or drag files on an NTFS-formatted external hard drive on Mac, you'll be unable to but see the greyed-out no symbol as below. And when you open files on this external hard drive, you will find your documents being read-only. For an NTFS file system SD card on Mac, files like photos are locked as you can only read them.

Therefore, if you find your external hard drive read-only, for example, a Seagate external hard drive shows read-only on Mac, the first thing that comes to your mind should be to check if this drive is NTFS file system.

How to check if an external hard drive is NTFS file system on Mac?

Simply, you can check this by viewing its disk information either in Disk Utility or in the Finder, and here is how.

Method 1: Check if an external hard drive is NTFS file system in Disk Utility

1. Click on Launchpad at the dock of your Mac and choose Other in the menu.
2. Choose Disk Utility among these utilities and open it.
3. When it is launched, click on the external hard drive you have problem with in the left sidebar. You will see an obvious 'Windows NT File System' in the right column.

Method 2: Check if an external hard drive is NTFS file system in the Finder

You can also check this in the Finder with a few clicks.

1. Open the Finder and right-click on this external hard drive.
2. Choose Get info in the context menu.
3. You will see 'Windows NT File System (NTFS)s' after File system if the read-only drive is formatted with Microsoft NTFS file system.

Then, after making sure that it is the Windows NTFS file system that makes your external hard drive read-only on Mac, you can go head to fix this problem. Try to repair the read-only external hard drive with or without formatting.

Solution 1: Using NTFS for Mac tool

If you have several important files on this external hard drive, and you frequently swap your work between Windows and Mac computers, formatting this drive definitely is the last solution you would resort to. The reason is, as you may know, formatting a hard disk will wipe your data out of this drive and cause data loss.

Then when external drive is NTFS-formatted, how can you fix the read-only drive without formatting?

An NTFS driver for Mac should be the most convenient tool for people who want to fix this issue without formatting, because you can work natively and seamlessly on NTFS file system external hard drives on your Mac in a few clicks. The NTFS for Mac software you can try is iBoysoft NTFS for Mac to make the NTFS drives writable on Mac.

About iBoysoft NTFS for Mac

iBoysoft NTFS for Mac can mount NTFS external hard drives in read-write mode on your Mac, granting people full access to read, write, edit, copy, and delete files on NTFS-formatted drives.

iBoysoft NTFS for Mac- Best NTFS Disk Management for Mac

Grant full access to Windows NTFS file system on Mac
Read, write, modify, transfer, and delete files on NTFS drives on Mac
Erase disks to NTFS file system on Mac
Unmount multiple drives with one click
Support macOS 11 to macOS 10.13

iBoysoft NTFS for Mac is also a wonderful tool to manage NTFS external drives on Mac. It's a menu bar app, from which users can mount, repair, erase NTFS hard drives, external hard drives, SD cards, USB flash drives, etc. with a simple click.

Tutorial to write to NTFS-formatted external hard drive on Mac with iBoysoft NTFS for Mac

1. Free download and install iBoysoft NTFS for Mac on your computer, and then restart the Mac.
2. Connect NTFS external hard drive to Mac and launch iBoysoft NTFS for Mac.
3. Write to NTFS external hard drive after the external hard drive is mounted successfully.

Solution 2: Enable NTFS read-write with Terminal (not recommend)

How To Determine The Memory Lft On A My Passport For Mac Hard Drive

You can also try the experimental method to enable NTFS read-write support with command prompt on your Mac. However, it is not recommended as it is not stable and could result in data loss if it goes wrong. So, use the command line with caution!

Warning: Do not use this method as a long-term solution to write to NTFS drives that contain important files. Meanwhile, do not use this method if you are not familiar with the command line, in case that you input a wrong command and cause unexpected damage to your Mac and drives.

Well, if you insist…here is how to do this:

1. Click Go at the upper right of your desktop and go to the Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
2. Input 'sudo nano /etc/fstab' to edit the fstab file (supply your password when prompted).
3. Type 'LABEL=NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse' in the editor window for the fstab file. (Be sure to change th

How To Determine The Memory Lft On A My Passport For Mac Hard Drive