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Making an external HD writable

T

thesdx

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 12, 2007
673
2
For some reason, my external hard drive is readable, but not writable. This is the first time I've tried it with a Mac. Is there any way to set permissions?
 
Yes, I think it's NTFS. Here's my situation:

I had to reinstall Windoze on someone's computer after a system failure. Before I reinstalled, I moved all of their stuff on their external hard drive on my iMac, and used the drive for backup. After the reinstallation, I loaded the backed up files on their computer. Now, I'm trying to get all of their stuff that's on my iMac back on the drive. So, I can't format it to HFS (or whatever format), as they use Windows.
 
One way around the limitation is to use a Parallels Desktop installation of Windows. I believe if the drive is accessed as a shared device, Parallels will be able to write to it.
 
gr8tfly said:
One way around the limitation is to use a Parallels Desktop installation of Windows. I believe if the drive is accessed as a shared device, Parallels will be able to write to it.
Click to expand...

I have VMWare Fusion, but I can't seem to get the drive working in Windows 2000. How do you make it as a shared device?
 
thesdx said:
Yes, I think it's NTFS. Here's my situation:

I had to reinstall Windoze on someone's computer after a system failure. Before I reinstalled, I moved all of their stuff on their external hard drive on my iMac, and used the drive for backup. After the reinstallation, I loaded the backed up files on their computer. Now, I'm trying to get all of their stuff that's on my iMac back on the drive. So, I can't format it to HFS (or whatever format), as they use Windows.
Click to expand...

If you have room, copy the current files from the NTFS drive to your Mac. Then, reformat the drive as FAT32 and copy those and the other stuff back on to it. (Or, since it sounds like the backup was temporary, just reformat the drive as FAT32.)

edit: as Eldorian mentioned, files < 4GB
 
gr8tfly said:
If you have room, copy the current files from the NTFS drive to your Mac. Then, reformat the drive as FAT32 and copy those and the other stuff back on to it. (Or, since it sounds like the backup was temporary, just reformat the drive as FAT32.)
Click to expand...

Can both Macs and PC's read/write FAT32? Also, can Disk Utility format drives as FAT32?
 
FAT32 is God awful. I had a similar issue as you and the general advice I got was to use FAT32.

My advice... format HFS+ and get an app on your PC's so you can access it. (MacDrive works well for me).
 
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