How do i remove the "read only " protection for my book 1.5 TB external hard drive?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

All of a sudden, by hard drive has become “read only” om my vista 64 bit hp duo core laptop. I cannot write or delete any files on the hard drive now.

please help!!!

thanks.

1 Like
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I had the same problem.  I think my is working now.  I error-checked using windows.  It found a couple of bad places, repaired them and it works fine now.

I hope this helps you because I know what it is like to try and fix something that is not supported well.

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I just encountered the same problem.

I have had the drive for about a month and happily writing to it until just now.

I have Compaq Presario, AMD Athlon Dual Core with 3 GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.10 with all available security updates.

“mount” says that the drive is mounted rw, nouid. I can look at the files on the drive and see ther premissions. The

group and user are root and the dirs are wide open. The filesystem is NTFS and although I am not happy that the POSIX premissions have been turned all the way on, the drive DID work.

So even ‘sudo touch foo’ at the toplevel dir fails and even after rebooting, both hot and cold.

It is a warm day, thank God, the spring had been cool here, I fear that I wouldn’t have gotten as much use out of the product for I am concerned about heating. Could heat wreck the firmware that does the write? I will leave the

thing alone and reboot when it is cooler, hoping the function will come back. Right now I am disappointed, judging by the bad commentary I’ve seen in a Google search. One would think that a major drive manufacturer would be more sensative to such bad press. Is there a class action suit happening, anyone?

Bruce Salem

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For  me the fix was to ckdisk under Windows Vista. Once I repaired the filesystem the drive mounted cleanly when I rebooted in Ubuntu. A problem is that Ubuntu, and other Linices as well, may not have all the hooks to make the NTFS filesystem happy when something goes wrong.

And I do not have enough info to say what exactly went wrong. All I know is that the filesystem integrety check, is that ckdisk?, under Vista found some lost blocks. Can someone say that Linux has enough to fix NTFS when it breaks, I am running U 8.10, not U 9.10, which I think is the bleeding edge.

Bruce Salem