Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Ownership & permissions problem with external HDD

O

otispunkmeyer

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 5, 2007
302
0
Middlesbrough UK
hello

i have a 400gb freecom external drive that i previously used with my old windows pc. having switched to OS X just recently.

i presumed that this thing would work like it always has, but saddly i am mistaken

basically i cant add or change anything on the drive. i have a bunch of videos (NCIS full series) and lots of images that i would like to put on that drive but it simply wont let me because i am only allowed to read.

how can i change this? i even went on to a windows pc and un-set read only but it appears not to have worked.

thanks
 
It seems to me that the problem you're having is not an ownership and permissions problem, rather its a problem of formatting. From what i understand from your post, you have used this disk with Windows, and now you cannot write on it with a Mac. This is happening because your disk is probably formatted in NTFS, which can be read by OSX but cannot be written on. To get the ability to write on the disk you should either reformat it into Fat32 (if you're planing to use it with both your PC and your Mac) or HFS+ (if its going to be used with your Mac exclusively).
There is another option, and that is to install FuseFS, and a NTFS driver, but I'm not sure how one would go about that, maybe someone else will know.
 
Blubbert said:
It seems to me that the problem you're having is not an ownership and permissions problem, rather its a problem of formatting. From what i understand from your post, you have used this disk with Windows, and now you cannot write on it with a Mac. This is happening because your disk is probably formatted in NTFS, which can be read by OSX but cannot be written on. To get the ability to write on the disk you should either reformat it into Fat32 (if you're planing to use it with both your PC and your Mac) or HFS+ (if its going to be used with your Mac exclusively).
There is another option, and that is to install FuseFS, and a NTFS driver, but I'm not sure how one would go about that, maybe someone else will know.
Click to expand...

umm im guessing this will mean bye bye about 250gig worth of stuff?
 
Your other option is to reconnect the drive to a Windows machine, Share the folders, and transfer the files to your Mac via a network. (assuming you have enough free space on a Mac-connected hard drive to save them) This gets you the files onto a HFS+ formatted drive. THen when you have all of the files backed up, you can reformat the external drive on the Mac.

Or burn the files off to DVDs on the Windows machine.
 
otispunkmeyer said:
umm im guessing this will mean bye bye about 250gig worth of stuff?
Click to expand...



Not sure what you mean, so I'll just lay down a possible solution. If you have room on your mac, copy the contents of the external to your mac, format it for a mac, copy the stuff back.

If you don't have room, copy the external to the old PC, format the external, and then pull the stuff over a network (firewire possibly) and put it back on the drive which is now formatted for mac.


Or is the entire crux of this problem that you don't have 250 gigs worth of temporary holding space for this data? If you have at least that much space, this isn't a very big deal to accomplish. If you don't have that much space... well... a 320 gig drive is like 80 bucks. Use it for your transfer, and then return it to the store in the same day.

Are you on an imac? a macbook?
 
i guess i should of made this clear

collectively, i dont have enough hdd space between this mac and the sole remaining windows machine in my house to store all the stuff while i format

guess i will have to go root through to delete stuff i dont need/want. then burn to multiple dvd's unless i can see if any of my mates have lots of hdd room

one guy i know has over a terabyte of space, but he lives a good few hours away! lol
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back