Read only hard drive?

[Adamo]

Just popped my old PC's SATA into my PowerMac G5, but it's only coming up as read only at the moment, do I need to do some special formatting somehow?

Thanks. 🙂

 

[Laser47]

Its probably NTFS formatted, macs can only read NTFS. Your only solution is to format it to HFS or FAT32.

 

[Eniregnat]

One of two things that I can think of in addition to the format.

1.) Get Info and change the permissions.

2.) Some drives have a jumper setting for write protection.

 

[janey]

Its probably NTFS formatted, macs can only read NTFS. Your only solution is to format it to HFS or FAT32.

Write support is possible, albeit experimental, I think disabled by default, and limited.

From the mount_ntfs man page:

WRITING
There is limited writing ability. Limitations: file must be nonresident
and must not contain any sparces (uninitialized areas); compressed files
are also not supported.

 

[Adamo]

I'm pretty sure the jumper settings are fine, since it was on my PC - how do I format the drive then? Can't find the option anywhere!

 

[yellow]

/Applications/Utlities/Disk Utility.app

 

[matticus008]

I'm pretty sure the jumper settings are fine, since it was on my PC - how do I format the drive then? Can't find the option anywhere!

Just in case, I'm going to point out that reformatting will erase that hard drive. If your intention is to use any of the files on it, make sure to copy them to your Mac's HD first.

You probably already know this, but one can never be sure of background knowledge with newbies to computer forums.

 

[Adamo]

Just in case, I'm going to point out that reformatting will erase that hard drive. If your intention is to use any of the files on it, make sure to copy them to your Mac's HD first.

You probably already know this, but one can never be sure of background knowledge with newbies to computer forums.

Yeah, I realise that, I can't remember what was on the drive, can't have been particularly important if I don't remember though, so never mind. 🙂 I now have a drive that was in my old PC working in my Mac! Yay. 🙂 Got 300GB in this machine now, woop woop.

yellow - many thanks for the help, all sorted thanks to you. 🙂