If you know the reason already, you can jump to the scenario that best describes your situation. If you are not sure which reason has caused your Mac external hard drive read only, check the scenarios one by one. Your WD My Passport hard drive is corrupted You have read-only permission to access WD My Passport hard drive Your WD My Passport hard drive is NTFS-formatted The most common reasons for a read-only WD external hard drive, like WD My Passport, are listed below: In other times, it suddenly became read-only after you have been using it for a while. Sometimes, the WD external hard drive is read-only on Mac when you just got a brand new WD external hard drive. Please continue reading and look for solutions for solving read-only WD My Passport on Mac problem. I'm extremely frustrated because this drive is in a read-only mode, and I can't figure out how to change it! Any suggestion to fix this?' 'I have a WD My Passport 320GB external hard drive that I am trying to hook up to my iMac for the first time.