How do "unlock" an external drive?

Community
1

I grabbed an old SATA hd from a previous PC that I’ve mounted in an external enclosure. I want to delete files. However many items in there are locked. It was the primary drive of the earlier system. I currently have it connected to my macbook (my only available computer at the moment).

Is there a way to unlock this external drive from the macbook? If not, is erasing it through the Disk Utility the only option?

Thanks in advance

2

Try to read the drive while logged in as user user “root”.

Ask a mac user how to do this if you don’t know how, I don’t know either, but I know it’s possible :slight_smile:

3

Not quite. I did log into root and tried to access the drive. It only allows me to read it.

4

If you don’t need any of the files on it, have you tried to format the drive?