Mac OS Ventura SD Card MS-DOS Fat32 Sharing & Permissions files cannot be unlocked or locked

Question

Mac OS Ventura SD Card MS-DOS Fat32 Sharing & Permissions files cannot be unlocked or locked

Hi,

I've upgraded to an M1 Macbook Pro with Ventura, noticed that when you have SD cards that are formatted MS-DOS FAT 32 you can't edit the Sharing & Permissions with the files on the SD card. I'm trying to delete files that are locked but have no means anymore to delete locked files OR go into Get Info to Delete them.

The files once copied from the SD card to the Mac APFS environment you can edit those files and unlock them.

Main issue is that you can't clear out locked files on the SD card without having to reformat it... seems a long and extreme way to purge files off when the previous version didn't appear to have this problem. Any ideas how anyone deleted locked files off SD cards now?

Thanks in advance.

Posted on Nov 18, 2022 08:29 AM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

66,806 points

Nov 18, 2022 05:28 PM in response to Gundamwingzero

There are no actual file permissions used with items on a FAT32 file system.

First, make sure there is no hardware switch on the SD card which locks it into read-only mode.

Second, make sure that "Ignore Ownership" is selected on the drive by using "Get Info".

Third, make sure macOS Privacy & Security Settings are configured to allow macOS to fully access that drive.

Control access to files and folders on Mac - Apple Support

Are you running any anti-virus apps, cleaning/optimizer apps, or third party security software which may be interfering with the normal operation of macOS? You can try booting into Safe Mode to see if the external drive works since Safe Mode prevents third party software from automatically launching during boot & login.

You may want to try erasing the SD card by using Disk Utility and seeing if that solves the problem. Sometimes storage devices formatted with other systems can cause problems with macOS accessing those drives.

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Answer 2

Nov 19, 2022 04:17 AM in response to HWTech

Hi HWTech,

Thanks for your reply. I had a bit of digging around the combinations of the formatting on the SD Cards

1) There is no hardware lock on the SD Cards

2) There is no option in Ventura when you goto Get Info on the Drive to select Ignore Ownership for MS DOS and ExFAT formatted SD Cards. (See attached picture, there Sharing and Permissions all it says is You have Custom Access)

3) I'm not running any apps its just pure SD card as an external storage device

4) Tried Safe Mode already, nothing changed & Formatting the SD cards again...

So it would appear there is some kind of historical legacy formats that no longer supported on Ventura specifically MSDOS FAT32 and ExFat. I literally plugged in the SD cards into another MBP with Big Sur and the Sharing and Permissions showed the groups and can change the locked or unlocked status on files.

Then

What I did try though was format the SD card (on Ventura) into APFS, Journalled and NTFS and the options all came back for Sharing and Permissions and lock tick on files etc.... So I'll have to try NTFS and see if my cameras and other devices will be ok with that format later.

Fairly annoying actually to discover this.

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Answer 3

Nov 22, 2022 11:20 AM in response to HWTech

I tried everything suggested and have the same problem. My SD card is from a dash cam and cannot be formatted to anything but what the camera can read, so I cannot format to something other than FAT32.

I restarted my Ventura iMac to an Admin profile in Safe mode and still cannot make any changes to the SD card files. The dash cam reserves saved files to a special folder on the card and eventually, those files will use all the space on the drive unless they are deleted after being downloaded to another device. Once they are on the iMac, the locked status can be changed, but as long as they are on the SD card, they cannot be changed or deleted. This is new to MacOS Ventura, as I never had a problem before. There seems to be NO new information on the internet referring to this issue.

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Answer 4

Nov 23, 2022 12:24 PM in response to Phillip Breske

Hi Phillip,

Yeah its really frustrating and I agree a Ventura specific problem... in the end my problem came back to my cameras also needing to be in FAT32 format.

My work around so far has been:

1) Create another folder

2) move the locked files into this new folder

3) At this new folder level, delete the new folder itself

That seems to be the only way to removed the locked files without having to reformat everything each time.

Hope this works for you aswell?

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Answer 5

Nov 23, 2022 12:29 PM in response to Gundamwingzero

I will give it a try next time. Thanks for the suggestion.

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Mac OS Ventura SD Card MS-DOS Fat32 Sharing & Permissions files cannot be unlocked or locked

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