Seagate External Hard Drive locked, can only read not write

external-diskhard driventfs

What Happened:

I plugged in my Seagate backup hard drive today (not Time Machine) after a few months and my computer can read the drive but not write to it.

Two obvious problems:

1) The drive is formatted as NTFS
2) The drive has (from top to bottom) "Read & Write", "Read-only", "Read-Only" permissions.

I know what you are going to say, but the NTFS writing software that Seagate has to write to these type of drives doesn't work on this version of macOS I guess the upgrade killed it because I have used the drive before on previous versions. When I try to run the software mac says "the developer needs to update this software to work with this version of Mac". I know each of those two problems are the cause of this issue but I am unable to find a solution. The "Ignore Ownership on the Volume" checkbox in the drive's show info box is not there.

Does Seagate have new software for writing to these drives? (I use a lot of open-source stuff, but for this I would prefer seagate official software)

Best Answer

Seagate provides an OEM-version of Paragon's Microsoft NTFS for Mac. The software is availbale at: Paragon Driver for macOS (10.10 and above). Direct link: NTFS_for_Mac

The installer build date is Sep 12, 2019. The installer's info.plist indicates compatibility:

MACOSX_MAX_VERSION 10.15

After downloading and installing it (and probably rebooting your Mac), you should have normal access to the NTFS volume again.


This OEM-version only works for Seagate drives!