Issues with deleting some malware through custom scans

Question

tMy ree Sophos anti-virus for Mac has identifedd a number of virus on my external hard drive , but all of them have to be cleaned manually - I have followed the instructions to create a custom scan and run it which has dientifed the threats- however alhtough the scan has been set to " delete " , the custom scan does not seem to delete the relevant files .

I have noticed when tracing the files in question through Finder , that the access is set as "read only" and wonder whether this could be the reason . If so how can I change the acess level to read and write ro whatever is necessary for the scan to delet the files ? . As it is a Mac, the repair Disk permissions is grayed out when pointing to the external hard drive where the malware is located, so I am unable to apply that . any suggestions/advice would be much appreciated .

Thanks

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Agile · Accepted Answer

Is this external drive formatted as Win32 instead of HFS+?

If you can reveal the file in the finder, you should be able to manually toss it in the trash; the Finder may ask you for your administrator password to do this.

Otherwise, you have two options.

1) You can navigate to the file, Get Info on it, and change the permissions there, or

2) Open Terminal.app, type 'cd ' and drag the parent folder to the Terminal window

2a) type 'sudo chmod a+rw ' <filename>

2b) enter your administrator password when prompted.

Or, you can stay in the terminal and do a "sudo rm -r <file>" if you're feeling gutsy. Note that this can have serious consequences for the operation of your computer if you do this on the wrong file/folder. It doesn't toss things in the trash, and is not recoverable except via restore from backup.

-Don't type the quotes.