Reformat HP Personal Media Drive for Mac?

[hisscat]

Hello. This is my first post...hoping someone can help.

My Mother gave me an HP Personal Media Drive with pictures of my children from the past 12 years. She formatted it on her PC, and when I plug it into my MacOSX, I can view the pix, but can't move anything new into it... and it has almost 400 GB remaining.

Does anyone know of a way to format it so I can keep the things she has saved, but still be able to use it with my Mac. Currently, the error prompt says "HP Personal Media Drive Cannot Be Modified"...

Any pros out there with insight? Thanks...

 

[r0k]

Hello. This is my first post...hoping someone can help.

My Mother gave me an HP Personal Media Drive with pictures of my children from the past 12 years. She formatted it on her PC, and when I plug it into my MacOSX, I can view the pix, but can't move anything new into it... and it has almost 400 GB remaining.

Does anyone know of a way to format it so I can keep the things she has saved, but still be able to use it with my Mac. Currently, the error prompt says "HP Personal Media Drive Cannot Be Modified"...

Any pros out there with insight? Thanks...

I assume it is a usb drive, right?

First of all, make sure you copy everything off the drive! When you format it, everything will be lost.

Second of all, you can format it in disk utility in HFS (OS X compatible) format. But then your mother will not be able to read it any more. If you don't care about windows users ever using the disk, then go ahead and format it but just don't forget to copy everything you want to keep somewhere else first!

 

[satcomer]

Well she formatted for the native Windows proprietary disk format of NTFS. Microsoft does NOT give out license the code so other operating system can write to NTFS. OS X use OS Extended. So OS X can only read NTFS, not natively write to it.

However so Mac developers have hack NTFS and you can find them here. Just pay attention to the reader reports before leaping forward.

Better yet just buy her MacDrive and she will see/write/format OS Extended with zero problem. I use this on my Windows 7 box and it is rock solid (so far). This why she and you can trade disks in OS Extended and her windows box won't even blink.

Now just drag out the pictures to you desktop or a folder to get them onto you hard disk. This way if you have to give it back to her it will not be damaged. If she gave you the disk then after you get the pictures of it, reformat it with /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and then move the pictures back on it.

 

[iLog.Genius]

I agree with satcomer but what I would recommend is leaving the file system as is and installing NTFS-3G on your Mac. The reason is you might be the only one using a Mac while everyone else is using Windows and it would be easier to share that drive with others if need be.

 

[MisterMe]

I agree with satcomer but what I would recommend is leaving the file system as is and installing NTFS-3G on your Mac. The reason is you might be the only one using a Mac while everyone else is using Windows and it would be easier to share that drive with others if need be.

Another vote for NTFS-3G. This free NTFS driver will give your Mac more flexibility with NTFS than the OP's mother's Windows PC.

 

[r0k]

I thought of NTFS before I replied the first time but the OP didn't say whether or not they still want the drive readable or writable by Windows.

If the drive never has to go back to windows, a better solution is to format HFS. If the drive needs to be shared with windows, a solution to allow OS X to write NTFS is better. Another alternative is to format it FAT32 which is readable and writable natively by Windows, OS X and Linux. Still, I would not recommend dealing with fat32 as it is more error prone than either NTFS or HFS.