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I have a Mac Book Pro. When I attach my external hard drive to it, I can only read rights. How to I get read and write rights?

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  • What is the formatting of the external hard drive? Is it NTFS? FAT? HFS? You can look this up by plugging in the HDD, right clicking on the HDD icon, pressing Get Info. There next to Format the formatting is shown.
    – Saaru Lindestøkke
    Jan 20, 2013 at 0:15

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A common cause of this would be the external drive being formatted in NTFS.

If your external hard drive is NTFS formatted (a common Windows format), MacOS X can only mount it read-only. There are third-party add-ons that would allow a Mac to write to a NTFS, but out of the box, Macs can read but not write to this format.

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