Permissions on External Drives

Hello...
I just switched to Mac and have a problem with my two external hard drives permissions under OS X. Both are NTFS (Windows NT) formatted and I can read data from them fine, but they are Read Only and the Get Info dialog box doesn't allow any option to change this. Therefore, I can't write to them. What can I do?

Thanks!
Matthew

NTFS is read-only for the Mac, therefore, you can't do any changes except format the drive.

What you could do is copy all the data from the external HD to your Mac or PC, reformat the external HD with FAT32 and then move back the files to the external HD. This has the advantage that the drive can be used by both, PC and Mac, as read- and writable.

If you don't want to use those drives with a PC anyway, you can also format it with HFS+, the Mac format. But that format is not even readable on Windows.

Little hint: When you format a HD with Disk Utility, you can select "MS-DOS filesystem", which will format the drive with FAT32.

Thanks so much for the quick reply. I thought that might be the issue. I will just format them and then recopy the data back to them. Thanks again!
Matthew

You can Partition an external drive, right? I was going to get an external and have it with a 100GB NTFS Partition and the rest FAT32 for my Mac, wasn't sure if that was possible though.

Jaysus said:

You can Partition an external drive, right? I was going to get an external and have it with a 100GB NTFS Partition and the rest FAT32 for my Mac, wasn't sure if that was possible though.

Click to expand...

If you do the partitioning with Windows, it's no big deal. But Windows 2k/XP have a size limit for FAT32...I don't remember exactly how much. I recenty wanted to format an 80GB HD with FAT32, without partitioning, and XP didn't let me go past a certain size...I think it was 20GB or 40GB.
Win98 though had no problem to format the whole 80GB in FAT32.