Day: November 2, 2023

If you can’t write to your USB drive on your Mac and you want to fix that, read this

If you are reading this, chances are you cannot write to your USB drive on your Mac.

To force a USB drive to be both read and writable, I did the following (note, I had a Kingston drive, so my Mac identified it as KINGSTON and I went with that. If you buy a USB drive that is not from Kingston, you may see something different):

  1. In Finder, go under Applications > Utilities and start Disk Utility
  2. Click on your USB disk on the left (E.g. KINGSTON) and then click on Erase (top right)
  3. You can change the name if you want (I left it at KINGSTON) and make Format: ExFAT
  4. Once you do that, click the Erase button to format the disk
  5. Click on Unmount (top right) to unmount the disk
  6. Open a terminal window (Open Finder. Go to Applications > Utilities > Terminal) Enter the following diskutil list command in the Terminal window and note the results:
    diskutil list
    /dev/disk2 (external, physical):
    #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
    0: FDisk_partition_scheme *62.0 GB disk2
    1: Windows_NTFS KINGSTON 62.0 GB disk2s1

    Note it my case the KINGSTON drive is associated with disk2s1. (you see that on the line “1: Windows_NTFS KINGSTON 62.0 GB disk2s1”. It may be different for you. Regardless, you want the drive name that comes after the 62.0 GB.)
  7. While in the terminal window, make a corresponding directory in the /Volumes area of your machine that has the name of your drive (in my case, KINGSTON)
    sudo mkdir /Volumes/KINGSTON
  8. Also in the terminal window, you can  mount your disk as writable and attach it to the mount point sudo mount -w -t ExFAT /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/KINGSTON

You should now be able to write to your drive as well as read it.