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one1

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 17, 2007
1,174
29
Chattanooga, TN
Running the last version of El Capitan on an iMac.

External is 320gb HD

Many years ago I put every CD I had on an external HD to plug into my MacBook when I was on the go long before iTunes became able to share your library. It works as it should, but Owners are disabled and I cannot delete any of my albums. I'm not interested in having almost 40% of whats on there anymore and I'd like to trim it down.

I *THINK* the problem happened when I let my iMac index the hard drive through iTunes, using it as simply an external library rather than playing randomly chosen songs from the Hard Drive. This would have been a couple years ago. I've never wanted to delete anything from it before so it has never been an issue.

I couldn't find any help in Disk Utility. I wish it was still like in Snow Leopard. It felt much more useable. I noticed it was formatted NTFS, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it. I usually format Journaled so IDK why it is like that.

Anyone have any ideas?



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I'd take the easy way out:

- Get ANOTHER drive that is large enough to hold the stuff you want to save.
- Copy all the albums you wish to KEEP to the second drive.
- ERASE the problem drive to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled
- RE-copy the files that are "kept" from the second drive back to the repaired one.
 
macOS can only read from NTFS drives. No writing, no deleting. You can enable write support with some Terminal commands or with third party software, Paragon or NTFS-3G, but as Fishrrman suggested, copying over to an HFS+ drive seems to be the obvious solution.
 
Well, That'd be it then. Thank you. I have plenty of space on the iMac so I'll just drag over what I want and wipe it. It's been so many years IDK how it ended up NTFS.
 
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