How do you get external hard drives to work?

[NovemberWhiskey]

I have an external hard drive that I have been using for my Pcs, and when I hook it up to my mac I cannot write to it (although I can read from it).

Is it possible to write to this external hard drive?

 

[Bill Gates]

This is what you need. Click the link under where it says "Download" titled "NTFS-3G 2009.4.4."

 

[NovemberWhiskey]

Thanks!

So this allows me to read/write to my external hdd without any other changes (e.g. reformatting)? I can keep all the current files on there and just plug and play?

Will this affect the use of the drive when I plug it in to a windows machine such as my bootcamp partition?

Thanks!

 

[davidjearly]

Thanks!

So this allows me to read/write to my external hdd without any other changes (e.g. reformatting)? I can keep all the current files on there and just plug and play?

Will this affect the use of the drive when I plug it in to a windows machine such as my bootcamp partition?

Thanks!

Assuming that your drive is formatted NTFS (which it seems to be), then yes this is what you need. It won't harm your data as it is installed on your Mac so that it can write to a Windows formatted NTFS drive.

 

[NovemberWhiskey]

Thanks! This seems to have worked very well!

I just installed the software, and was able to write to my external HDD immediately. Nothing else to set up (e.g. reformatting drive).

To test it out, I just copied some files over to my external HDD (eHDD), and then mounted the eHDD to my bootcamp partition being virtualized by Fusion. I was able to read over on that side without a problem.

Now my question is whether or not have can have both my bootcamp partition and my MacHD recognize the eHDD without having to dismount/unplug/replug the eHDD? i.e. Can I set it up so that when I plug in my eHDD, it mounts on both the windows side (virtualized in vmware) and the mac side?

 

[Bill Gates]

Thanks! This seems to have worked very well!

I just installed the software, and was able to write to my external HDD immediately. Nothing else to set up (e.g. reformatting drive).

To test it out, I just copied some files over to my external HDD (eHDD), and then mounted the eHDD to my bootcamp partition being virtualized by Fusion. I was able to read over on that side without a problem.

Now my question is whether or not have can have both my bootcamp partition and my MacHD recognize the eHDD without having to dismount/unplug/replug the eHDD? i.e. Can I set it up so that when I plug in my eHDD, it mounts on both the windows side (virtualized in vmware) and the mac side?

Set up your hard drive as a shared folder in VMware. That way, when you mount it under OS X, Windows will be able to access it as a subdirectory of the z drive that VMware creates (z by default.