How to make external drive writable?

[Topher15]

After installing the 10.5.6 upgrade this morning, my external drive (2 partitions) failed to mount. (Thread here.) Eventually I got both to mount, although now they are both read only. So, how can make them writable? I've tried Sharing & Permissions in Get Info, but obviously cannot change anything there.

I'm currently copying all my storage data onto a couple of smaller hard drives because I might just reformat them, then copy at the files back, but in the mean time I'd like to know how I go about making them writable.

Cheers.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Do you have enough extra storage that you can copy the files onto another drive and format that one? It sounds like the drive has become corrupted somehow...

 

[Topher15]

Yeah I think thats what I'm going to do.

I have 311GB on the storage partition on the drive. Will have to split it between my old 250GB and 150GB external drives.

I don't have enough for my Time Machine 300GB backup so to avoid starting my backup from scratch I'm thinking I'll first erase the storage partition, copy the TM backup to it, then sort out the TM partition and then copy TM backup back. Then I can copy all my media to the storage partition.

Gonna take ages! 🙁 I wish at times like these I liked these long computer jobs...

 

[Topher15]

Bloody hell... so after spending the last few hours copying stuff over, the drive becomes writable, all my itself??! 😕 😱

 

[Topher15]

double post