Permissions issue with external drive - First Aid greyed out

[supremegopher]

I'm a noob with Macs so bear with me. I have a SATA HDD connected through a USB enclosure to my Mac Mini. I pulled it from a separate system running Linux Mint and it was used for Plex storage. I setup Plex on my Mini and moved my drive over to it and it works just fine for playing the contents through Plex. However, it is mounting as read-only and Disk Utility shows owners is disabled. I can't modify any permissions and I can't access First Aid as it is greyed out. How can I take ownership of the drive? Reformatting is absolutely not an option. I am logged in as the admin and sole user on the Mini. When I go into "Get Info" for the drive in Finder, it shows my user has Read & Write but above that it says "You can only read". In a terminal, the drive shows as being owned by my user and I have rwx permissions but trying to write a file to it results in an error for "read-only file system". I also have a second external drive formatted in the same way and have the same issue.


NTFS formatted external drive
Mac Mini 2014
Big Sur

 

[DeltaMac]

Macs cannot natively write or modify files on an NTFS volume. That's why you see it mounted as read-only.
Because you can't modify any files, that also means you can't modify any permissions, and you also can't use First Aid in your Disk Utility on that drive.
If you need to use those two drives in preset form, then you can install NTFS drivers, which will allow you full access to the drives. Be careful that you get the most up-to-date NTFS drivers, as they have only recently been modified to work in Big Sur systems. Here's one choice (the paid-for versions usually give you faster performance from NTFS drives)

Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Tuxera – Read & write Windows drives - Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Tuxera–Read & write Windows drives

ntfsformac.tuxera.com

You need the Release Candidate for Big Sur support.

 

[supremegopher]

Ah, thanks. It's not important enough for me to pay for a driver. Looks like I'll have to just deal with it for now and figure out a way to backup the files and reformat to exFAT. Linux played friendlier with NTFS.