External Hard Drive unable to be modified. Please help..

[YahonMaizosz]

I have a Lacie External Hard Drive that I had been using with my Windows system.

Now, I decided to transfer some of my stuffs from my MBP to this Lacie External, however, it won't allow me. It keeps giving me warning that "Lacie External Hard Drive Cannot be modified".

I had tried to modify the "Lock" property from "Get Info" but its option is grayed out.. I am unable to change it..

Please help me, I really need to use this external in order to backup some of my stuffs..

 

[spinnerlys]

What filesystem is the external HDD formatted in?
NTFS, FAT32 (MS-DOS) or HFS+?

NTFS can't be written to by Mac OS X natively, you need MacFuse and NTFS-3G to do so.

By modifying the "Lock" property, do you mean you can't press the little Lock icon on the bottom right to enter your username and password to change the permissions?

 

[YahonMaizosz]

What filesystem is the external HDD formatted in?
NTFS, FAT32 (MS-DOS) or HFS+?

NTFS can't be written to by Mac OS X natively, you need MacFuse and NTFS-3G to do so.

By modifying the "Lock" property, do you mean you can't press the little Lock icon on the bottom right to enter your username and password to change the permissions?

All that you have said are true... Is MacFuse a software?

I can't modify the "lock" property like what you had said...

 

[spinnerlys]

All that you have said are true... Is MacFuse a software?

I can't modify the "lock" property like what you had said...

I don't understand....
Is the drive formatted in NTFS or FAT32 or HFS+? It can't be formatted with three filesystems unless you have three different partitions.

Most obviously the drive is formatted with NTFS, as you can't seem to click the little lock icon.

Use the Get Info window to find out, if your drive is NTFS formatted.

Also MacFuse is a software, that can be used to read and write to a lot of different file systems, and NTFS-3G is the driver to write to NTFS formatted drives.

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

 

[YahonMaizosz]

What filesystem is the external HDD formatted in?
NTFS, FAT32 (MS-DOS) or HFS+?

NTFS can't be written to by Mac OS X natively, you need MacFuse and NTFS-3G to do so.

By modifying the "Lock" property, do you mean you can't press the little Lock icon on the bottom right to enter your username and password to change the permissions?

I had followed ur advice and use NTFS-3G to fix my problem.. Now my external hard drive works like a charm..

 

[ecstasy]

Helpful thread for me in the future, as I have a NTFS-formatted external as well.

Thank you, spinnerlys, you sexy beast.

 

[Dandnic]

Can't modify drive. Reformatting?

Hi,
I bought an external hard drive on Ebay but am unable to modify it because it is formatted NTFS. Unfortunately I cannot use software which would allow me to work around this problem because my OS is too old. I bought the drive to back up my system so I could install Leopard but it appears that I need a newer OS to be able to use the drive (go figure: ). I tried to use the Disk Utility but all options are grayed out. Running G4 1GHz PowerPC OS 10.3.9. Any suggestions on how to reformat with my present OS or perhaps erase the drive using someone's PC? Thanks!

Denise

 

[spinnerlys]

You should be able to just format it with Disk Utility, even in Panther (10.3.9 - 10.4 is Tiger, 10.5 is Leopard, the latest Mac OS, and 10.6 is Snow Leopard, to come in September 2009).

Just go to Disk Utility, select the drive and go to the "Erase" tab and select the appropriate file system (HFS+) and just hit erase.
Then there will be a warning, that by doing so, all data will be lost, and just press okay, if the data on that drive can be lost.

There is also MacFuse + NTFS-3G o write to NTFS formatted volumes.

 

[Dandnic]

Can't modify drive. Reformatting?

Yeah, I tried that but when I select the drive I am offered zero options (all are gray). Also would try Macfuse but have to be running Tiger to use it. Want to hear the funny part? This all started because I bought a new printer. The printer won't run with Panther, so I bought Leopard, but wanted to back up my system, so I bought the external drive, and here we are... What is NTFS-3G?
Will it run on Panther? Any more suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Denise

 

[spinnerlys]

NTFS-3G is the NTFS driver for MacFuse to write to NTFS.
MacFuse is just the software to enable different filesystems under Mac OS X.

Can you post a screen shot (via Applications > Utilities > Grab or CMD+SHIFT+1 through 4) of your Disk Utility window while your external drive is selected and one of the message (the whole process so to speak)?

I mean, I am able to format drives in 10.2.6, while shouldn't you in 10.3.x?

So maybe posting a screen shot (with the help of flicker or imageshack or whatever image sharing site you come up with) will help see other users what might be the problem.

 

[Dandnic]

Well,
I have royally screwed things up now. I guess I should have left it alone. Disk Utility wouldn't allow me to erase or reformat for whatever reason but there was an option to partition the drive so I tried it, but after an hour and no progress I quit the application. Now my mac won't recognize the drive. I am getting a new external drive and will try to fix this one when I figure out what to do next. Thank you for all your help.

Denise