External Hard Drive

[jwpraw]

I've had this external hard drive for a while now, using it on my PC. Now that I have an Apple, I want to use it on that. It is formatted for PC and on this Apple, it is read only. I'm pretty sure that means I have to format it to Apple, right? I called Apple and they said they don't support that sort of stuff, I can't find the phone number to the hard drive manufacturor and I now turn to you for help. How can I make the HD read and writeable on my Apple? I don't care if it becomes useless for PC.

Thankyou!

 

[reh]

The drive is probably formated as NTFS, which is only readable by non-windows computers. If the drive is only going to be used with your Mac, then refomat it as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" using Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility). If you want to share the drive between Mac OS X and Windows, then format it as MS-DOS.

This will erase all data on the drive.

 

[sjpetry]

I've had this external hard drive for a while now, using it on my PC. Now that I have an Apple, I want to use it on that. It is formatted for PC and on this Apple, it is read only. I'm pretty sure that means I have to format it to Apple, right? I called Apple and they said they don't support that sort of stuff, I can't find the phone number to the hard drive manufacturor and I now turn to you for help. How can I make the HD read and writeable on my Apple? I don't care if it becomes useless for PC.

Thankyou!

Go into Disk Utility > select the drive in Disk Utility > go to Partition > format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

 

[sjpetry]

reh beat me.




damn


I hope you don't have problems with your Mac, if you do the people here can help you. ; )

 

[DJMastaWes]

Hey guys I have the same problem. I did that and now my computer is screwy and the hard drive is not readable by the computer.

Heres my thread
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/224771/

ANY help would be great.

 

[jwpraw]

Wow, thankyou guys for that!!

It worked perfectly.

I have one last question; now that I have the hard drive to keep backups, other than Apple's Backup, are there any other good programs like Backup that are free? I really like Backup but I don't want to continue using .mac and I need something that will work without .mac.

Thankyou!

 

[chasemac]

Wow, thankyou guys for that!!

It worked perfectly.

I have one last question; now that I have the hard drive to keep backups, other than Apple's Backup, are there any other good programs like Backup that are free? I really like Backup but I don't want to continue using .mac and I need something that will work without .mac.

Thankyou!

I think this is a pretty good freebie.
http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/