help with external hard drive

cocco · Dec 24, 2010

Hi. Yesterday, before leaving work yesterday, I formatted my external hard drive (toshiba) on my work PC. I was in a hurry, and now that I'm home (and don't want to go into work til Jan), i see that the drive is read-only on my mac (OS 10.5.8).

Is there anyway I can reformat it on my mac as read/write without having to go back to my work computer?? I use this to backup another external drive with lightroom archives and want it running asap.

Thanks!
Cocco

DaFlake · Dec 24, 2010

I assume that you have no data on this drive? If not, then you can use Disk Utility to format it to HPFS (mac only) or FAT (Mac and Windows).

s2odin · Dec 24, 2010

cocco said:
Hi. Yesterday, before leaving work yesterday, I formatted my external hard drive (toshiba) on my work PC. I was in a hurry, and now that I'm home (and don't want to go into work til Jan), i see that the drive is read-only on my mac (OS 10.5.8).

Is there anyway I can reformat it on my mac as read/write without having to go back to my work computer?? I use this to backup another external drive with lightroom archives and want it running asap.

Thanks!
Cocco

You want it to be read/write for just Mac? Or both PC and Mac?

Just plug in the external hard drive and open Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Then select the external from the list, go to the Erase tab, and make the format be Mac OS X Extended (journaled).
If you want it to be read and write by both PC and Mac, make the format be FAT32.

cocco · Dec 24, 2010

Glorious, thank you. Zeroing out the data now. (no, there was no data).

help with external hard drive

cocco

DaFlake

s2odin

cocco

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