Ext HD Read Only??

[asaad]

I'm using my external HD that I had on my PC and it'll let me take things from there to my computer, but not the other way around...any help? Thanks.

 

[overanalyzer]

Is is NTFS formatted? If so, it'll be read-only on your Mac. FAT32 will let you both read and write on both your Mac and PC. You can also use Mac Drive to make a Mac-formatted drive readable on your PC.

 

[Crow47]

As opposed to "Mac-Drive" you can just use the disk utility located under applications -> utilities.

 

[asaad]

As opposed to "Mac-Drive" you can just use the disk utility located under applications -> utilities.

I went to disk utility and it says Format : Windows NT File System (NTFS)

 

[Crow47]

Yep, that's what we thought. Go ahead and reformat that drive into either the option that says something to the effect of "microsoft dos file system" or one of the other mac file systems. Only use the microsoft one if you want to use that drive in a pc.

 

[solvs]

But be aware that if you reformat, you'll lose all your data.

There are experimental programs out there that will allow the system to write to NTFS (do a Google search for "Mac NTFS"), but none of them work very well IMO.

 

[jablko]

I know this is superfluous to point out, but make sure your data from the drive is backed up before reformatting.

Windows will tell you that you can only format a drive smaller than 32 gb using FAT32, but that's an artificial limit set by MicroSoft. Using your Mac or third party utilities on the PC (such as Maxtor MaxBlast, available for free download from Seagate), you can format the disk and Windows and OSX will play nicely together. I personally use FAT32 for all drives that I'm not booting from to increase compatibility between OSX, Windows and Linux.

 

[overanalyzer]

As opposed to "Mac-Drive" you can just use the disk utility located under applications -> utilities.

Actually Mac Drive allows you to read Apple-formatted drives in Windows. Disk Utility will allow for reformatting the drive to FAT32. They're separate and different-purposed solutions, in part because FAT32 doesn't support files over 4GB in size, dynamic partition resizing, external drive booting on Mac or some of the other features you can get from HFS+. So if you want/need HFS+ functionality, Mac Drive will let you have it on your Mac and still use the drive in Windows when needed.

 

[asaad]

thanks for all the help everyone...yeah just sucks cause I have to get about 80gb's worth of files off of it before I reformat. But at least I won't have to see the "your startup disk is almost full" warning any more, and hopefully ill finally be able to test out time machine.


ah one more question, is best buy a good spot to go to get all this stuff put onto discs so I can reformat and put the stuff back on to the hd.