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help with external hard drive

M

maiasmac

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 28, 2008
10
0
so i am using my friends mac, i am a pc person and dont know crap about macs lol, i hooked up my external hard drive to the comp mac, it will let me read the things on the hard drive but if i want to add things from the mac to the external hard drive it says i cant, because it cant be modified, i went to file then get info clicked on owenrship and permissions and it says i can read only, but i want to write, is there a way to fix that or is it not possible because its a external hd from a pc and mac wont let me write? any help is appreciated, thanks
 
I'd bet the drive is formated NTFS. Apple won't write to it. I don't know if there is any third party software that can help you out. If you can.... format the drive. If the drive will go back and forth from windows to os x, then use FAT. But remember a FAT harddrive is an anceient process, and cannot save single files larger than 4gb.
 
yeah i believe it is ntfs, suck apple wont write to it, if i format the drive i will lose everything on it right? or can i format it with out losing the my stuff? if i have to i can put the stuff back on pc then format then re put my stuff back on it, how do i format with FAT? i dont have single files larger then 4gb so thats ok
 
also, when i format can i format on mac or does it have to be formatted on pc?
 
Or your Mac friend can use MacFUSE to read and write the contents of the NTFS drive, if you absolutely can't format the drive. But in any case, I'd recommend formatting to FAT32 if you can and using it that way.

NTFS isn't supported on a Mac because it's proprietary, and Microsoft requires a licensing fee of other companies to fully access it. Not sure how MacFUSE gets around this, but I imagine Microsoft is less likely to go after some open source hackers than they are Apple. :)
 
ok great thanks, i will probably transfer my data to pc then format then re put data on hd, how do i format to fat32 on mac?
 
maiasmac said:
ok great thanks, i will probably transfer my data to pc then format then re put data on hd, how do i format to fat32 on mac?
Click to expand...
Application-Utilities-Disk Utility Select the drive in the left panel and then select the Erase tab.
 
havnt done it yet, but when i do i should be able to, im just so much more used to pc, adjusting to mac is just hard and annoying lol
 
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