SOLVED Can't edit any bootable external drives anymore (Monterey M1)

[Mattissimo]

Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for any help.

At some point pretty recently, all external drives that were also bootable stopped allowing me to edit them at all (not trying to boot from them).
I'm about 90% sure I was still able to edit those files after I got my new M1 MBP (now running Monterey 12.2.1) a few months ago.

In the disk's Get Info window, The "Ignore ownership on this disk" box is checked. I tried to set drives to read & write by everyone (not just my user account) and it says that I don't have permission.

Is this just the way it is for all users of Monterey or did I do something? I couldn't find any info online or in this forum.

Thanks for any help at all!

Matt

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

• What version of OS X/macOS are on the external drives?
• How are they formatted?
• What kind of editing are you trying to do?

C

 

[Mattissimo]

Hi Cory.

Thanks for getting back about this any help you can give.

I have lots of external drives with various clones of my older computers running 10.15, 10.13, and some various older ones too. The newer of these (10.15) are on APFS and older ones are Mac OS Extended / GUID.

I kept all kinds of data on those, like projects I was working on, to use just as external storage.

Interestingly, a clone of my current M1 Monterey system on a TB3 drive is actually writable.

Also, I just tried booting into one of those drives on my older mac (that part worked fine) and then going into the drive's "Get Info" and setting permissions to everyone: read and write, but it gave me the same error "The operation can't be completed because you don't have the necessary permission".

Thanks!
-Matt

 

[Mattissimo]

I fixed the drives!
Disk Utility's first aid on the drive, container, and volume.

Two the drives so far.

I don't know how they got messed up though.
And it was a few of them. Maybe a bug in an early Monterey?

Thanks!