Problems with external HD

[willyhunt]

Okay, Hi just got my Mac Mini today (not a bad piece of kit). Anway my problem is my external USB HD. It has all my junk on it so to speak and while I can transfer data from it to the Mac it wont allow me to delete or add anything to it. Now I have just come from Windows and the HD is formatted as NTFS (If this means anything?) Also I clicked the properties and it says I can read and write and I have unlocked it but it still wont work.
So how would I go about being able to write and delete stuff on it?
Sorry if I am being thick. Cheers.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Your Mac will only read from NTFS-formatted disks, not write to it.

You need to copy everything off that disk, erase & reformat it to OS X journaled using Disk Utility and then copy everything back.

Disk Utility is in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder.

 

[willyhunt]

I was hoping you would'nt say that but thanks.

You need to copy everything off that disk, erase & reformat it to OS X journaled using Disk Utility and then copy everything back.

 

[Crikey]

Or if you still want to use your external hard disk with Windows machines you could format FAT32 as a kind of lowest-common-denominator.


Crikey

 

[chrisa107]

If you have Partition Magic or some similiar program for windows, you can format the drive to FAT32 without losing any data - I did that for my former NTFS external drive, and now it works perfectly with both OSX and Windows as a FAT32 drive.