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vyspiansky/sd-card-write-access-macos.md

Created May 23, 2025 07:55
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Enable write access to an SD card on macOS
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sd-card-write-access-macos.md

To list mounted volumes use the following command in the Terminal (Applications > Utilities):

ls -la /Volumes/

For instance, our SD card is mounted as NO NAME.

Let's check extended attributes

ls -la@ "/Volumes/NO NAME"

As a result we see that our SD card is formatted as MS-DOS/FAT32 (indicated by the com.apple.filesystems.msdosfs.volume_id extended attribute), and all files/folders have restrictive 600/700 permissions instead of the typical 755/644 for FAT32.

Change permissions to allow broader access:

sudo chmod 755 "/Volumes/NO NAME"

NOTE: The chmod 755 command modified the mount options rather than actual file permissions.

Create a test file to confirm write access is working:

touch "/Volumes/NO NAME/test.txt"

Or check your actual access with:

[ -w "/Volumes/NO NAME" ] && echo "Write access: YES" || echo "Write access: NO"

Output:

Write access: YES
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