External Drive "cannot be modified"

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Hey guys, i just recently purchased a seagate free agent go for my macbook. Whenever I try to move files from the mac to the drive, it says the drive can't be modified. Is this a format problem? I can see folders in the drive, but I can't change them or put anything in them.

The mac is a school computer so I don't have any administrative powers, but I do have a PC at home running win7 i can use to reformat the drive if that is needed.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
2.8 GHz 15" MacBook Pro OS X 10.7.x & some old Macs
The first thing you should do check what format your external is in. You can do this by opening up Disk Utilities while the external is connected. Click on the drive and at the bottom it will tell you what format the drive is in.

Some manufacturers pre-format their drives to Windows NTSF and if that is your problem then it would explain why you can't write to the drive. If you can't use Disk Utilities to format the drive to Mac's Extended Journal then you can use your Windows machine and format the drive to FAT32 which can use by both computers. If that doesn't work then your school is maybe locking out your computer somehow and you will need to talk to your school about it.
 
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The first thing you should do check what format your external is in. You can do this by opening up Disk Utilities while the external is connected. Click on the drive and at the bottom it will tell you what format the drive is in.

Some manufacturers pre-format their drives to Windows NTSF and if that is your problem then it would explain why you can't write to the drive. If you can't use Disk Utilities to format the drive to Mac's Extended Journal then you can use your Windows machine and format the drive to FAT32 which can use by both computers. If that doesn't work then your school is maybe locking out your computer somehow and you will need to talk to your school about it.

It was in NTSF, thanks. When I went to re format there was no option for FAT32, there was NTSF und exFAT i think it was. I'm trying exFAT, if that doesn't work I will have to try something else. I have a virtual computer running linux so I may try to reformat it with that if I can't get it to work with windows.



EDIT:: W00t got it working! exFAT didn't work, OSX wouldn't read it or anything, went into disk utility, and saw that I could convert it to ms-dos(fat) Seems to work well.


Oh the joys of having three operating systems :D


Thanks for the help!
 

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