I recently bought a WD MyPassword 2TB external hard drive to backup my laptop. When I first plugged it in and attempted to mount it, the drive was read-only:
# get the external drive device name
fdisk -l
[...]
Disk /dev/sda: 1.82 TiB, 2000365289472 bytes, 3906963456 sectors
Disk model: My Passport 2626
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: $REMOVED_DISK_IDENTIFIER
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 3906961407 3906959360 1.8T Microsoft basic data
# mount the drive
mkdir /mnt/wd-passport
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/wd-passport
touch /mnt/wd-passport/file
touch: cannot touch 'file': Read-only file system
Frustratingly, the product page says the drive is compatible with:
Windows® 10 or Windows 8.1 operating systems. Requires reformatting for other operating systems.
After a quick search, [1] I found out I was simply missing support for the external hard drive’s filesystem type: ntfs. I fixed this by installing the missing package:
yay -Sy ntfs-3g
# I can do a backup of my disk (nvme0n1)
dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=4096 | gzip > /mnt/wd-passport/xps.img.gz
Hope this helps!
Links
[1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=169310