New maxtor 500gb drive

[metalgearmac]

I purchased a new hard drive and i plug it in and it shows up but it appears i have to use the dumb maxtor software. I want to be able to just drag whatever i choose to my drive with out having to sync or back up a whole folder everytime. I do not like this software at all. Can anyone help me with this problem?

[rogersmj]

You never, ever have to use the lame software that hard drive manufacturers give you. It's a hard drive -- they all interface with the OS the same way!

You didn't provide any real detail about your problem, so I'm not sure how much help we can be. With a new drive, you should just plug it in, maybe partition/format it with Disk Utility, and you're good to go. Maybe you could be more specific about where in this process you're encountering problems.

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

You need to use which dumb maxtor software and for what?

[metalgearmac]

sorry for not being specific enough. I plugged the hard drive into my comp via firewire the the hard drive will show up on my desktop I can go into the hard drive and look around but if i try to drag something into the hard drive a message pops up saying "New Volume" cannot be modified. I know I do not have to use the software but I cannot find a way around it.

[Moof1904]

It sounds like it's a Windows formatted drive that's Read-only on the Mac. Launch Disk Utility in your Utilities folder and reformat the drive as a Mac volume and that should solve your problems.

[rogersmj]

Yeah, it's probably formatted for NTFS (which only Windows can write to). You typically have to format a new drive when you get it -- I don't think I've seen one yet that will work out of the box on a Mac. If they're preformatted for anything, it's Windows. Just use Disk Utility to Partition it and you'll be all set. I'm not quite sure why that would make you jump to the conclusion that you have to use the included software, of all things, just to write to a disk...but good luck.