Network Volumes

[Bianca5CA7]

Someone please help! I have a MacBook Pro M1 Chip and I use an external hardrive and all my catalogs are stored there. My hard drive was working fine then all of a sudden when I open a catalogue I get this error message. 

"Lightroom cannot open the catalog named "xxx" located on volume "yyy" because Lightroom cannot save changes to this location." with a further message that "Lightroom Catalogs can not be opened on network volumes, removable storage, or read only volumes."

I have looked at permissions and everything approved. My hard drive is formatted as exfat I'm not sure what else to do. 

[dj_paige]

First, there is this: https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/quick-tips-how-to-give-full-disk-access...

If that doesn't work, you need to verify that both the drive AND the folder where the catalog is located is not set to read-only. It's not enough to verify that the drive is not set to read only.

[SeanMcCormack]

Is there as DCIM folder copied to the root folder of the drive? Someone reported that this makes Lightroom think the drive is a glorified memory card. 

[Bianca5CA7]

I did not see that folder in the externals hard drive. 

[Jao vdL]

The problem might be that this is an exFAT volume and you are storing the catalog files on it. It is very easy to get corruption to occur on those as they are not journaled so this is an inherently dangerous thing to do. With an M1 Mac you really want to use APFS or MacOS extended journaled with the first preferred. That said, the error message suggests another problem where for some reason you cannot write to this drive. Have you tried just copying some files to the same location in Finder?

[Bianca5CA7]

@Jao vdL I'm not sure I understand the last question. Currently I'm moving everything over from my external hard drive to my Mac and see if I can just reformat the drive.

[Jao vdL]

I was curious if you would get an error message just copying a file to the external drive in the location where your catalog is. That said, it is a good idea to reformat the drive into a native format after you have rescued everything of the drive. Make sure to use the GUID partition scheme and format as APFS. There is a surprisingly good step-by-step tutorial here on how to accomplish this: https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/how-to-format-your-drive-apfs-on-macos-big-sur-and-later/

Do note that after you do this, you won't be able to read from the drive on windows computers.

[Bianca5CA7]

@Jao vdL it didn't copy any files. I'm actually now moving my stuff to another drive that will be APFS format and then reformat this one and see if it will work. I'll keep you updated thanks so much for the help and responses.