external portable hard disk problem...please help me

im not sure im posting on the right room but i think this is related. admin, if you found this is the wrong room please tell me to re-post

i bought a external wd portable hard disk (passport ellite) and after using it every is fine. However, i can only copy file to it and can not send and file from this to another storage...can any one explain to me what is happenning?...thanks

What is the Passport Elite formatted as i.e. Fat32, Mac OS Extended Journal?
From the factory it usually is Fat32 and that could be the problem, in which case reformatting it to Mac OS Extended Journal will fix the problem.
Note:
If you also want to have a Windows machine read the drive then you should leave it as FAT32

DavidH

How are you trying to copy files from the disk?

Usually people have trouble copying to a disk rather than from it

DavidHH said:

What is the Passport Elite formatted as i.e. Fat32, Mac OS Extended Journal?
From the factory it usually is Fat32 and that could be the problem, in which case reformatting it to Mac OS Extended Journal will fix the problem.
Note:
If you also want to have a Windows machine read the drive then you should leave it as FAT32

DavidH

Click to expand...

thanks i have thought about this because when i purchase it from ebay they also advise me to reformat. however, in the parkage they did not content and instruction how to format it.

thanhdao said:

thanks i have thought about this because when i purchase it from ebay they also advise me to reformat. however, in the parkage they did not content and instruction how to format it.

Click to expand...

Plug it into Mac. Utilities -> Disk Utility. Click on the drive and then select Erase and make the format be Mac OS X Extended (Journaled)

louishen said:

How are you trying to copy files from the disk?

Usually people have trouble copying to a disk rather than from it

Click to expand...

i got it another way i can copy file from another external hard drive store but i can not copy a file from my external hard drive to another hard drive. How can i fix it? PS (i already format the hard drive)