I have attached my 60gb usb external hard-disk to my new poermac (my first mac) and while i can read and copy files from it i can't copy anything to it.
when i drag a file over it says "the disk can not be modified".
i noticed a little pencil with a line through it in the bottom left corner of the wondow which i assume means write ability is off. tried clickiing it but nothing. so how do i enable the disk to be written to?
Is this USB external used on a PC with Windows? If so is it formatted NTFS? If so, Mac OSX and pretty much everything else but windows NT, 2k and XP can not write to NTFS. OSX and Linux will read an NTFS partition but at this time not write to it. If your drive is formatted NTFS, I would say, go to a windows machine and convert it to a FAT 32 Partition. Most everything will both read and write to FAT32.
If it's not a windows formatted drive then write back and we will try and figure it out.
Mac Specs: 15" Unibody MBP (2009), White MB (2009), iMac G4
Go to Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) and click on your drive on the left hand side. Click the erase tab and select what format you would like from the drop down menu. OS X can format a drive to FAT32 so you won't need to do it from a Windows computer. FAT32 will allow you to use the drive with either a Mac or a Windows PC, but there are some restrictions, such as files larger than (I think) 2 GB in size cannot be copied to a FAT32 drive. If you are only going to be using this drive with your Mac, then format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This will give you full usage with your Mac but will not be readable by Windows.
EDIT: Should have mentioned that if you do this, you will lose all data on the drive, so you will want to back it up first. You can copy the files from the NTFS formatted drive to your Mac, format it, then copy them back over.
