Brand New Hard Drive Needs Reformating?

Hi! This is my 3rd WD 2 TB hard drive - I installed the software but says the hard drive is “read only” and needs to be reformatted? never had this issue before, not sure how to proceed.

If you do not have any data on it that is important. Then you can format the drive so it can be write/read on Mac and PC

Follow to link below

Out of habit … i always format brand new hard drives in case the automated factory process didn’t do it properly.

example story: I bought a 2TB WD Elements drive a while back. Opened the packaging, plugged it into my PC and formatted it … And no problems using it

A friend visited with his brand new 2TB WE Elements … plugged it in, and couldn’t copy anything to it. So, i formatted it for him (there was no data on the drive) … drive worked perfectly fine after that.

When your external drive or any storage drive shows up as “Read Only” on your mac, then you might be encountering a very common problem with the hard drive. In such situation, user can open and view the files on a drive but cannot copy or move files to the storage drive. The possible reasons for this issue could be:

  1. External drive is NTFS formatted
  2. Disk permission changed as “Read Only”
  3. External drive is corrupted

However, the issue can be fixed using below DIY methods:

  1. Reformat the external drive
  2. Change/Ignore permissions on external drive
  3. Repair external drive with disk utility’s first aid

Hope this will help you fix the issue!