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External Hard Drive Problem

T

ThaQuest

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 1, 2007
28
0
I have an old 80gb Samsung external 2.5" hard drive, whice I've been using it on Windows machines for 2 years until switching to Mac a year ago. When I got the Mac, I formatted the drive to work on both Mac and Windows systems, and it has been running fine ever since.

However recently, I've found that I cannot drag and drop or copy and paste files as I wish, whether within the drive or to other drives.

Everything else seems normal. Any idea how to solve this problem? I've looked within Disk Utility to no avail.

Thanks!
 
I think I know what your problem is:
If it's right what I think, you have formatted your harddrive to fat(-32), correct?
If that is what you deed, than you can't copy or paste any files that are bigger than 4 gigabytes.
So what do you need to do?
You should format your Harddrive to NFTS of something with an N and a T.
You can't do that in Mac OS X.
You can do that in windows, in one of the harddrive utilities or something like that. What you can do too is format it to Mac OS journaled in Mac OS X, but then you can't open it in windows.
So you can choose.
Or maybe you have an other problem...
 
I formatted it to MS-DOS, which works on both systems. Previously I have been able to drag and drop to other drives, no matter the size of the files. Just last week I was doing it. It just randomly stopped allowing me to do that. I have no idea whats up. I did plug it into several Window's machines, so that might have caused the problem though, but I doubt it, as I've done that plenty of times with no problem. Anyone else?
 
rupie94 said:
Ok, have you tried plugging it in to a mac?
Click to expand...

Yes, I am on my Mac right now, and it won't work. I do recall dragging and dropping onto another Windows machine with no problem last week. And in the past I have always been able to drag and drop on this Mac as well. Any other ideas?
 
Well if it just doesn't work, you should reformat it again I think.
Maybe you can get the data from your harddisk with special software (search for it on google)
 
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