external HD says can't be modified when trying to copy stuff.

[SR 7]

I bought an external Hard drive and tried copying a video file to it from my mac but it didn't let and it said "drive cannot be modified"

how do I go about this?

 

[old-wiz]

What's the format of the external HD? Is it NTFS? if so you need an add-on for osx to be able to write to it.

 

[SR 7]

What's the format of the external HD? Is it NTFS? if so you need an add-on for osx to be able to write to it.

its a regular external hard drive via USB. I didn't do anything to it. I put stuff from a PC and it went on and it works but from my Mac it doesn't.

 

[Bacong]

its a regular external hard drive via USB. I didn't do anything to it. I put stuff from a PC and it went on and it works but from my Mac it doesn't.

It's not formatted for Mac, likely. "regular external hard drive" is absolutely meaningless. We need to know the format.

See this? It's the disk utility app in OS X. I have my external drive selected, and it shows the format, which is read and write on both OS X and Windows.

 

[old-wiz]

If you can't write to it it is almost certainly NTFS.

 

[SR 7]

It's not formatted for Mac, likely. "regular external hard drive" is absolutely meaningless. We need to know the format.

See this? It's the disk utility app in OS X. I have my external drive selected, and it shows the format, which is read and write on both OS X and Windows.

so how do I do taht? where I can read and write on both OS?

 

[Bacong]

so how do I do taht? where I can read and write on both OS?

Sorry for the late response:

Open up disk utility app. Select your external on the side, and click "erase" on the right menu. A drop down menu will ask you how you want to format the drive, select MS-DOS.

As always, reformatting the drive will result in the loss of all data on the drive.