06-01-2007, 01:32 PM

So I just got my first mac and its great, but I have one beef - os x wont let me copy files back and forth from my external hdd. I have a fujitsu 80 gb hdd and I want to back up some files from the my macbook pro. When I try to copy files over to the external it says the external folder cannot be modified. I looked at the external hdd under 'get info' and it said something about it being a windows format. Do I need to reformat my external hard so it can work with os x and if so how do i do that?

ps. i can pull files off the external but i cannot copy files onto it.

any help would save me from losing my hair, thanks.

06-01-2007, 01:46 PM

yup, must use mac software, but some externals are not mac compatible and as such will not work. Look at the instructional manual that came with the external or go online to find out.

06-01-2007, 01:59 PM

Let me guess, the drive is NTFS formatted, right?

Macs can read from but not write to NTFS drives (don't blame Apple). You need to reformat the drive as FAT-32 on your Mac and then you can use it on both Windows and the Mac.

06-01-2007, 02:30 PM

how do i format in os x?

06-01-2007, 02:37 PM

1-Backup whatever is on the drive.

2-Open Disc Utility (It's inside the Utilities folder which is inside your Applications folder).

3-Select the disc, select MacOS Extended (Journaled) from the drop down menu and click erase.

There will be two icons for the drive, one upper and one lower, in a hierarchal list. If you want to reformat as OSX, it doesn't matter which one you choose. If you want to reformat as FAT-32 for Windows compatibility, you must select the upper one and select MS-DOS from the drop down menu.

06-01-2007, 04:26 PM

thanks worked like a charm, i formatted the hdd to fat32 now its both mac and win compatible.

06-01-2007, 04:32 PM

Cool, glad it worked out for you.