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Thread: External HD

  1. 11-05-2008, 06:49 AM #1
    cliffw0970 is offline

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    External HD
    Hi All

    I bought a mac book a few weeks ago, I was using an external HD with my Windows laptop to save music, pics, videos etc

    When I plug the HD into the Mac I can see the images and take the music to itunes etc but I cant add anything to it or change files within in it etc

    Any ideas?

    Thanks
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  2. 11-05-2008, 08:29 AM #2
    jonkovach is offline

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    First thing I think of is to check the permissions levels...?
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  3. 11-05-2008, 10:56 AM #3
    Vinny Vegas is offline

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    Have same issue...working w/ Apple store next Monday for solution. I think it has do do w/ creating shared folders w/in each environment...

    My work around has been to drag items needed to Mac desktop so I can have it on Mac side to work w/ or view.

    I'm sure it's pretty simple in making this seamless but I haven't taken too much time in trying to figure it out...

    Hope we can get a solution here...
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  4. 11-05-2008, 11:13 AM #4
    aquariaguy is offline

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    Having the same problem too. It's frustrating because I can't transfer big files that I have on my mac to my harddrive. How do i put stuff on my HD?? Anyone know? I can't even delete anything off the HD. I don't have my PC anymore so what do I do?!
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  5. 11-05-2008, 11:35 AM #5
    eric is offline

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    check the format of the drive.

    it's most likley NTFS. natively a mac can read but not modify/delete files on an NTFS drive. format the drive FAT32 if you want to access the drive on both win and osx. alternately there are third party apps for both win and mac to read/write the other native file system (NTFS or HFS+).
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  6. 11-05-2008, 11:55 AM #6
    05GT is offline

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    It's because the drive is formatted in NTFS. That makes it read only when plugged into your Mac.
    -13.3 Macbook Pro Retina / 64GB iP5 / 16GB iPad Mini
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  7. 11-05-2008, 02:01 PM #7
    Vinny Vegas is offline

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    Makes sense...

    Reformatting Ext HD, will that wipe out all the data & make it clean? I'll assume YES so that data needs to be moved elsewhere then moved back on...

    Thx
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  8. 11-05-2008, 02:04 PM #8
    Vinny Vegas is offline

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    Quote Originally Posted by eric View Post
    check the format of the drive.

    it's most likley NTFS. natively a mac can read but not modify/delete files on an NTFS drive. format the drive FAT32 if you want to access the drive on both win and osx. alternately there are third party apps for both win and mac to read/write the other native file system (NTFS or HFS+).
    Should this be done if you are trying to go straight Mac? The files I have are pictures, video, XLS, PPT, WORD files...all created from the PC side.

    I want to be able to access them, use them, change & save while also using Ext HD as a backup & storage for Mac...

    Thx
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  9. 11-05-2008, 02:09 PM #9
    eric is offline

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    if you're going entirely mac, you can format HFS+ which will be a little more stable than FAT and suport larger file sizes (> 4GB). The "windows" files can be stored on any file system, it will just be trickier to get tham back on a windows pc if you ever need to do that.
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  10. 11-05-2008, 03:00 PM #10
    05GT is offline

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    Here's a thread I started a while back.

    http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-...fs-drives.html
    -13.3 Macbook Pro Retina / 64GB iP5 / 16GB iPad Mini
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  11. 11-06-2008, 05:46 AM #11
    cliffw0970 is offline

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    Thanks to all that replied, I fully understand my issue now and can set about getting the drive formatted, dont suppose will be too chuffed about me borrowing 500gb HD space to dump my files to so I can format the disk though lol
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