My Mac Book Versus My PC formated External Drive Questions
 

I have a external hard drive question..

I got a external hard drive that was orginally used on my PC.. I got a new one for Christmas and now I want to use the *OLD* one for my Mac and brought it to the office

When I plug it in to my mac it loads up fine but I can't transfer files just play them.

I guess it's set to read only? Can change it from this Mac to turn read only off? is so how? or do I have to bring the harddrive home and change the read only settings from my pc?

Please advise

Hi D, I believe that the hard drive that you used for your PC has to be reformatted to "Mac Journaled" before your Mac will recognize it as a read/write drive.

If you can read the files you can copy them.

copy the files to the MAC (or backup the removable drive in any preferred manner)
reformat the drive using the MAC OS

you should then be able to achive full functionality on the removable drive


hope that helps

.

MacFUSE is free and allows Mac to write to NTFS partitions. Also, if you decide to format for Mac there is a PC program called MacDrive.

if you were able to write on it previously from PC it's definitely not set to read-only.
Macs and NTFS don't play well together as far as i know. when you want to use any removable media on both Macs and PCs it recommended to format it with FAT32

Hey Dean,

How would I do that?

This guy knows. I call him up for all of my Techy geek questions.:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Be sure to save any files that you may need on that drive. Reformatting will erase the drive.

Here's how I do it...