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I think my external HD is read-only

MattDell

MattDell

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I can't delete anything off of it from my Mac, or move any folders around. Is there something I need to do to it? It's a LaCie 160GB.


-Matt
 
Is it formatted to HFS+ or FAT32? If not and it is NTFS, it will be read-only under OSX. The others mentioned will be read and write.
 
MattDell said:
It is NTFS. Is there any way to convert it without losing my data?
Click to expand...

Not in the sense that you take the drive and reconstruct it in a different format while perserving the files on it, no...

Is it possible to back it up to some other device, format it, and restore the files?
 
How about making this a sticky

We must get several threads a week where the poster has an external disk which they're trying to write to, which is not working because it's formatted in NTFS format. Candidate for a sticky maybe?
 
mkrishnan said:
Not in the sense that you take the drive and reconstruct it in a different format while perserving the files on it, no...

Is it possible to back it up to some other device, format it, and restore the files?
Click to expand...
Is there a WinRAR program for Mac? The only thing I could think of would be to burn everything to multiple DVDs.

-Matt
 
MattDell said:
Is there a WinRAR program for Mac? The only thing I could think of would be to burn everything to multiple DVDs.
Click to expand...

That is most likely what you will have to do, unless you can use the disk served off a Windows machine.

Do you have access to the Windows machine you formatted the disk on? Can you burn DVDs of its contents from there?

Otherwise, you can use Disk Utility or Toast or what have you to burn it onto DVDs....
 
mkrishnan said:
I can one up you...I just started this, and I haven't added one before, but please feel free to help! 🙂

http://guides.macrumors.com/Drives_and_Filesystems
Click to expand...

Looks good! I would maybe add another limitation comment that if you want to create a partition to use as a bootable backup/clone then your choice should be MacOS format. Also I'm sure I had a few problems at one time creating or mounting a sparseimage file on a FAT32 volume, but maybe that was just me.
 
Thanks! I did add some things about that, and also about the question of using Windows and OS X on the same Intel-based Mac. I don't know that much about the file systems that bootable optical media use... so I'd be happy to add that, but just don't know what to say. Bootable optical media are not HFS+, as far as I know, but rather something else.
 
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