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Brand New to Mac

R

renysmom

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 20, 2008
6
0
Greeting all -

I just bought my mac today and have got it up and running. Wow what a different world than Windows.

My first problem is that I have 3 external drives hooked up. Somehow on one I was able to make myself be able to read and write to it but on the other two they are set toread only and I cannot find a way to change it.

I went to get info and where the security is it is grey'd out and I canfind no way to change it.

How in the world do I give myself permissions to these drives?

Thanks

Kelly
 
OS X can't write to NTFS formatted drives, which is what you probably have. It's possible to get it to do this using MacFUSE and NTFS-3G, or by reformatting the drives to FAT32 (the format both Mac OS and Windows can read without trouble).
 
I'm not going to be a lot of help on this one, but google what I tell you to verify, please. I take no responsibility if my instructions mess up your computer.

Open terminal. Type chmod 444 (now drag your drive into the terminal window). Press enter.


I think that that will make it so you can read/write to the drive.

Make sure that the drives are either FAT32 or OSX extended. If they are formatted NTFS then you cannot write to them.
 
You are already way over my head :)

Are you saying that even though these HD are mac compatable (I googled and checked) that I can't just plug and play)
If I reformat to FA32 will it erase the H's? I am not willing to do that, way to much data and files which I use all the time. If that tdoesn't erase them how do I reformat them?

I can see them on the desktop, it lets me open the files just not do anything with them.

Thanks
 
If you don't want to install another app, i.e., you want ot be able to read and write to these drives natively, then yes, you'll have to reformat them.

The fact that they're Mac compatible means that they'll be recognized by a Mac. however, they most likely came from the factory formatted as NTFS drives -- were they immediately recognized when you plugged them into your Windows machine?

If you have to reformat for use with OS X, then please make sure you backup the drive contents, as files will be lost during the reformat.
 
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