External Hard Drive

[overminer]

Hello,

Just switch my main computer at home from pc to mac (the last vestige of pc in the home). I attached my external hd to the mac and realized that it was read only on the mac. Can anyone tell me how to change this so that mac can write and change files existing on the external hd. On a side note how do I reformat the external hd on a mac. Thanks for any help in advance.

 

[shinchook]

Hello,

Just switch my main computer at home from pc to mac (the last vestige of pc in the home). I attached my external hd to the mac and realized that it was read only on the mac. Can anyone tell me how to change this so that mac can write and change files existing on the external hd. On a side note how do I reformat the external hd on a mac. Thanks for any help in advance.

Unfortunately based on if the hard drive was formated in NTFS or not the mac would only be able to read no writing. If you want to format it to a proper format you have to go to the disk utility in the utilities folder under the mac hard drive volume. Using this you would go to the "erase" tab and reformat the hard drive. This would, of course, delete everything on the hard drive.

 

[overminer]

Thanks. That was a fast response. I guess I wait a couple weeks till I can move the files to a bigger external HD and then I'll reformat the existing external HD

 

[shinchook]

you can also use bootcamp to load up windows temporarily and use that to load the info onto a dvd or something