External Harddrives!

[ICELAND]

Two of my friends have external harddrives, and when I try to take files off of them, I can, but when I try to put files onto them, I get "The item (File) could not be moved because (harddrive) could not be modified" and this blows. I have a Mac, they're both pc users. I forget the exact harddrives but they both have the format Windows NT File System, and one is a 160gb hd1600 HP Personal Media Harddrive.

Sooo, tell me something about external harddrives, is this a typical problem for Mac users, can it be gotten around, or do I have to go buy my own Mac-compatible hard drive in order to give them files from my own comp? If that's the case...what's it gonna cost me? Gah. This is aggravating, especially since they see it as another reason to tell me that Macs suck.

 

[mrgreen4242]

Two of my friends have external harddrives, and when I try to take files off of them, I can, but when I try to put files onto them, I get "The item (File) could not be moved because (harddrive) could not be modified" and this blows. I have a Mac, they're both pc users. I forget the exact harddrives but they both have the format Windows NT File System, and one is a 160gb hd1600 HP Personal Media Harddrive.

Sooo, tell me something about external harddrives, is this a typical problem for Mac users, can it be gotten around, or do I have to go buy my own Mac-compatible hard drive in order to give them files from my own comp? If that's the case...what's it gonna cost me? Gah. This is aggravating, especially since they see it as another reason to tell me that Macs suck.

Last I checked, the NTFS filesystem was read only for Linux and Mac... there are some read/write drivers out there, but they aren't reliable enough for production use.

All you have to do is have the drive formatted in FAT32, so that both Windows, Mac, and Linux machines can read/write it without trouble.

Blame Microsoft for using a non-standard, closed filesystem in XP/2k, btw. Windows is no more capable of writing to an ext2 formatted drive than Linux/Macs are of writing to a NTFS one. In fact, I'm not sure Windows can even read a ext2 partition, or a HFS one for that matter. It's more a case of Windows sucking, as usual, than Macs.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Their hard drives are most likely formatted with NTFS. Macs cannot write to NTFS volumes. The FAT-32 formatting method should allow both of you to read and write, but you need to educate yourself as to the limitations of file naming for compatibility.

PC's cannot read Mac HFS+ formatting either, unless they have additional commercial software that translates the HFS+ format for Windows.

 

[ICELAND]

All you have to do is have the drive formatted in FAT32, so that both Windows, Mac, and Linux machines can read/write it without trouble.

Thanks for the info. Now how do I do that?

 

[Duff-Man]

Thanks for the info. Now how do I do that?

Duff-Man says...you can actually do that from OS X using Disk Utility (in your Utilities folder). Connect the drive, open Disk Utility...select the drive at the very top of its structure in Disk Utility and go to the Erase tab and select "MS-Dos format" from the pop-up list and away you go. Of course, this will erase everything on the drive so make sure anything on it that is needed is backed up. And of course, this all can be done from the Windoze PC's as well.....oh yeah!