Is there a way to change a read-only file system to a writable file system on Mac Catalina?

Question

I'm trying to copy a file from one folder to another folder. I'm getting an error message saying the destination folder is a Read-only file system. I initially thought that changing the file permissions would alleviate the issue, but it did not. What can I do to copy files from one folder to another? Here is the command I used:

cp sourceFolder/someFile.txt /destFolder

Error message:

cp: /destFolder: Read-only file system

Solution

MacOS Catalina has System Integrity Protection or SIP. This needs to be disabled to cp files. To do this I restarted in recovery mode, entered csrutil disable into the terminal. Restarted and mounted the file system as write with sudo mount -uw /. Then restarted in recovery mode again and csrutil enable in terminal and restarted.

Comments

[Tatha]

I tried to do the same in Big Sur but getting "mount_apfs: volume could not be mounted: Permission denied" though i am an administrator . Any idea?

[STL34]

Did you use sudo?

[Tatha]

yes. though it seems they have changed the architecture . more details here. reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/he4umc/…