Are you unable to access the external drive you connected to your Mac? Perhaps you can’t move files to it? You may need to unlock and format it first. We’ll walk you through the steps to help you do just that.
What Does It Mean When a Hard Drive Is Locked on Your Mac?
You’re rarely going to come across a locked hard disk on a Mac. But if you do, it can mean one of the three things mentioned below:
You cannot use the hard disk with your Mac in all three cases unless you resolve the issue. And this is a problem you can face with any external storage disk, including the best SSDs and storage drives for Macs.
How to Unlock a Hard Drive on macOS
You can easily fix permissions-related issues with a hard drive and use it with your Mac. After plugging the disk into your Mac, Control-click the external drive icon in Finder, followed by Get Info. Expand the Sharing & Permissions section. You should see a Lock button in the bottom-right corner. Click it and enter your Mac’s admin password in the dialog box that appears. Then, check the option to Ignore ownership on this volume. By doing this, your Mac treats all the files on the disk as though they’re owned by the current user, no matter who actually owns them.
This option won’t appear if you’re not the Mac’s administrator or the connected external hard disk is not yours. In such cases, you must ask the Mac’s admin for the password to change the external hard disk’s permission settings. Alternatively, you can add a new user from your contact book and only give them read/write access to the external hard disk.
If the external drive you want to use is encrypted, you must unlock it first. This is only possible if you know the password to decrypt it. If you do, Control-click on the external drive’s name on your Mac and select Decrypt “Drive Name”. Enter the password when prompted to start the decryption process. In case you don’t know the password, your only option is to format the hard disk, which will erase all the stored content. This will essentially unlock the hard disk and enable you to use it with your Mac.
Similarly, your options are limited if the external hard drive appears as “Read only” on your Mac. This is because the disk is formatted in NTFS file format. macOS can only read disks in this format, not write to them. Consequently, you won’t be able to add, change, or delete files.
You can use a third-party app to write to an NTFS disk on a Mac. Or, if you bought an external hard drive from Seagate, it should come with Paragon Driver, which lets you read and write data interchangeably on Windows and Mac without formatting the drive.
Apple silicon Mac users must change the startup disk security settings to “Reduced Security” for the NTFS driver to function properly. To do this, boot your Mac into macOS Recovery. Then, choose Utilities > Startup Security Utility and change the security policy.
Alternatively, you can format the external drive in exFAT format, which has no realistic file or partition size limits. In the event of a crash, though, you might lose your data. There are also APFS and Mac OS Extended file systems, which work exclusively with Macs and have their own pros and cons.
How to Format an External Hard Drive on Mac
With the external drive unlocked, you should format it so that you can use it with your Mac. If you can access the drive’s contents, back them up, as formatting will erase all data.
You should also consider how you plan to use the drive. Different file systems are better for certain tasks, so you’ll need to select the right file system for your needs. If you’re unsure, take a look at our rundown of the best Mac file systems for external drives.
Unlocking and using an external hard drive with your Mac can get complicated if it’s in the wrong format or you are facing permission issues. This can force you to format the drive, but that might not always be possible if you have important data on it.
Once you’ve resolved the issues, you can store and run applications directly from an external drive on your Mac. You can also use it to back up your Mac using Time Machine. The choice is yours!
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