External harddrive incompatible?

I have a 1.5TB external HDD from Western Digital which I bought recently and have a lot of stuff on. I can access the files and put them onto my Mac, but for some reason it won't let me copy/cut and paste things from my Mac onto my harddrive. Any ideas as to why this is? It's quite frustrating, and doesn't happen with my PC!

It is likely that the drive is formatted with the NTFS file system, which Mac OS X can read, but not write to. You'll need to have your drive formatted in FAT32 for it to work with both a Mac and a PC.

Gotcha.

...How do I go about doing that?

Open up Disk Utilities in your Applications Utilities folder and then select your external hard drive and under the Erase tab pick the format you want and then click on erase. Make sure to backup anything you want to save on the drive before doing so because it will all be deleted.

What version of OSX are you running? If 10.6 Snow Leopard, there is a way to enable full Read/Write support for NTFS.

I have Snow Leopard... Brand new MacBook Pro 2.66GHz.

Is there a way to do that without deleting all the info?

Yes. Download and install the free NTFS Mounter. As dtravis pointed out it will turn on NTFS read - write support in Snow Leopard.

Regards.

Forgot all about NTFS Mounter.

I was going to show him the terminal command. Thanks Chscag for that! I can't believe I forgot that little utility.

dtravis7 said:

Forgot all about NTFS Mounter.

Click to expand...

You are not the only one.

dtravis7 said:

Forgot all about NTFS Mounter.

I was going to show him the terminal command. Thanks Chscag for that! I can't believe I forgot that little utility.

Click to expand...

Would you be able to post the terminal commands? I'm new to the mac world & knowing more commands wouldnt hurt

10.6: Enable native NTFS read/write support - Mac OS X Hints

I would still use NTFS mounter just because it's easy and there is no chance for an mistake at the command prompt.