Help with Big Sur Permissions

[tartanjulie]

Recently bought a new iMac & I'm having problems setting up some things but most importantly is my external hard drives. I have an WD elements & also passport which isn't allowing me access to. I am not new to Apple but I'm not very technical. I have had nothing but problems since upgrading to Big Sur on my old MacBook. All of a sudden my old printer won't allow scanning etc but I can live with that. I really need these hard drives to be functional on the iMac. I do unlock the padlock, I click to change it but it comes up with I do not have permission. See screenshot. I can make the changes on my old MacBook but it reverts back as soon as I eject it.

Apple support were pretty useless for another issue so I am not gonna waste my time with this especially as they won't be interested in an non apple product I'm sure.

 

[Geoff777]

Does this article help?

https://www.fireebok.com/resource/how-to-fix-when-you-do-not-have-the-necessary-permission-on-mac.html

 

[svenmany]

I'm hesitant to chime in, since I might just add noise. But...

If you look at that volume in Disk Utility, does it show as Owners: Enabled? If so, then maybe disabling owners will allow you to work with the volume. The diskutil command will allow you to do that - https://www.unix.com/man-page/OSX/8/diskutil/.

I've seen hints of this before, in other posts; the upgrade to Big Sur seems to change who "YOU" are. Existing file system objects no longer recognize you as having permission.

Disclaimer: I have no hands-on experience with the command "diskutil disableOwnership".

 

[Ruggy]

I see the file format is NTFS. I think that could be the problem because you are very limited in what you can do on a mac with that file format.
I frankly don't know enough about it to be sure but being a licensed Windows format, you can't alter the files, write to the drive etc and I'm not sure you can copy them.
Usually, you need FAT or EXFAT to be sure you can go between Window and Mac.
I would see if that's the problem as I think that is what your message is in fact telling you, but there are people that really know a lot more about that than I do who will be able to tell you for sure if you ask about that.

 

[svenmany]

I see the file format is NTFS. I think that could be the problem because you are very limited in what you can do on a mac with that file format.
I frankly don't know enough about it to be sure but being a licensed Windows format, you can't alter the files, write to the drive etc and I'm not sure you can copy them.
Usually, you need FAT or EXFAT to be sure you can go between Window and Mac.
I would see if that's the problem as I think that is what your message is in fact telling you, but there are people that really know a lot more about that than I do who will be able to tell you for sure if you ask about that.

Your eyes are much better than mine; I totally missed that.

But, I want to add something to my post about altering ownership. It's not recorded on the drive; it's information recorded on your Mac, communicating information about the drive. The man page for enabling ownership says:

The on-root-disk Volume Database at /var/db/volinfo.database is manipulated such that the User and Group ID settings of files, directories, and links (file system objects, or "FSOs") on the target volume are taken into account.