Unable to rename files on external HD

I have an external HD connected to mac, and I needed to rename some of the files. I went to finder and click on the file name to rename it but it won't let me! I believe this External HD was in FAT32 format, so I should be able to write, correct?

I was able to transfer things onto this drive, so I should be in the right format. What did I do wrong?

hmm, Does an error pop up? Does the file show as locked? If it's locked, I think you may have to unlock it before you can rename it, but someone who's had longer mac experience then I might be able to answer more on the locking aspect.

Are you sure it's formatted as FAT32? The symptoms sound very much like an NTFS formatted partition.

I'm not 100% positive, but I thought most standard HD came formatted as FAT32?

fayewolf said:

I'm not 100% positive, but I thought most standard HD came formatted as FAT32?

Click to expand...

Unlikely. The default format for most hard drives (especially those that are greater than 32GB in size) is NTFS.

If you can't reformat the drive, I would recommend Paragon's NTFS for Mac. It's a solid program that gives you full read/write/modify access to NTFS drives. Highly recommended.

I'm having the same problem. My external HD is formatted in the HFS format
I think it's called mac os x extended journaled
It says I don't have permission to rename, grrr I don't get why!

look into the Get Info panel for the folder you are trying to edit (or the drive root) to see if you really have read/write permissions

I do have read/write permissions, I also unlock it by pressing the little lock icon in the bottom right hand corner it doesn't make a difference

one more thing would be to check the owner of those files you are trying to rename. If you don't have administrator rights and the file is owned by somebody else, then even if you have write access to the disk, you still wouldn't be able to change existing files

this is across all unix systems.

to see the owner, type in terminal: (in the directory of your misbehaving files)
ls -l
the listing will show the file owner in one of the left columns

to change the owner use chown:
chown user_to_be_assigned filename
(for this you need to be an admin/root)