External Hard Drive "Control"

Hey all. I have a Seagate Free Agent 1TB external hard drive, a little less than two years old. Originally purchased to back up music on a PC.

I eecently purchased a MacBook Pro, and had no problem transferring my music from the external onto my machine other than the fact that it took forever. I had to sort through the vast amounts of doubles, incomplete albums, and missing album art work file by file. I trimmed 126gig with a LOT of doubles and crap to about 53gigs...took a LOONG time.

Now that I have my music library trimmed down, cleaned up and organized on my Laptop, I wanna back up this new clean library and delete all the old stuff from the external. I also want the external free and clear so I can use it as a regular place to back up this new MacBook using Time Machine.

Problem is, I can't delete any of the files from the external. I can copy them, and move them over with ease but I can't get rid of them.

Any thoughts? I know there is a bunch of software that the external drive came loaded with. I still have all that and haven't really explored it. Perhaps there are some answers there.

Thanks in advance for the help!

Is it formatted NTFS? If so, you can't write to it natively. There are third party applications that allow this, but I've never used any, so I can't recommend any of them.

How do I find out if it is? And if it is, how do I make it so I can utilize it and write to it natively?

Yup. NTFS. How do I fix this so I can use it. My MacBook is my primary computer now, I don't want to hold on to my desktop for very long.

I have a 3TB external drive 3/4 full of music, NTFS formatted. I purchased Paragon NTFS for Mac®. Best $20 I've spent.

Even if the OP DOES install Paragon, it won't allow TimeMachine to use it. It'll need to be formatted as HFS+ to do use it as that.

If you have all of the data on the drive on to other locations (say your internal drive on your mbp), then open disk utility, select the drive on the left hand side, click on the erase tab, ensure that "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" is selected and click on 'erase'.

This will format the drive to HFS+, and allow it to be used as a TimeMachine backup location.

as such.

If you are going to use that drive for Time Machine you will need to format it as HFS+. You can do that using the Disk Utility program on your Mac. If you are not too familiar with Disk Utility Using the Free Disk Utility on Your Mac should get you started.

Indeed. As far as Paragon, I was just stating for non-time machine use. Sorry, I wasn't clear there.

I have a 1.5TB external for use with Time Machine. I formatted exactly as shown in Dysfunction's image.

Awesome help everyone. Thanks so much. I'm gonna format this one to HFS+ and use it entirely for backing up my system. I'll purchase another external when the time comes that I'll need to share it with a PC of some sort.