Permission on External Hardisk Drive

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Jan 13, 2010
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Your Mac's Specs
macbookpro 15" 3.05GHz 4GB DDR3 500HDD / IMac 27' i7 8GB DDR3 ram 2TB Sata HDD / Iphone4
i m currently having trouble on editing the files and folders on my external hdd, it is a xp based western digital 320GB external hdd which it says the hdd is locked and i m only allow to view and read....m i going to reformat the external hdd so that it is compatible to mac os?! cause i m having trouble copying and pasting even a single files into the external hdd. i can copy the files out and yet i cant add in a new one....help needed as i need to backup my files to the external hdd, i had logged into the setting for time machines, and it says that the hdd is incompatible filesystem.
and it just work fine on a kingston data traveler 4GB thumb drive....and why is it working fine on thumb drive and not the external hdd?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
late 08 macbook 2.0 4gig 320hdd10.7.3 32 gig iPhone 4s
If you wish to use TM for incremental back-ups or CCC , SD for a bootable back-up then yes you will need to format the drive to HFS+ journaled . However doing this WILL delete ALL the data you currently have on the drive. The reason you cant write to it now is that it is formatted NTFS and your Mac cant write to it natively ( well I guess it can now in 10.6 ) So you will need a third party app to allow you to write to the drive but just for data storage.

Here is one such solution but I am sure there are others
PARAGON Software Group - NTFS for Mac, communication channel between Mac OS X and Windows

heres a tutorial on how to get NTFS support in 10.6+ if you have it. There is also one floating around here but couldnt find it . With this process you wouldn't need a third party app.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382

Hope this helps
Clay
 
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15in MBP 2.5GHz Core2Duo | 1.83Ghz Dual G5 PowerMac | 2.0 GHz Dual G5 PowerMac
I second to using Paragon NTFS, I use it as well for my system. Especially if you are using Bootcamp in any way, and any external hard drive formatted for NTFS, it is needed.
 

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