External HD Read Only?

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I have an IDE HD from my old PC and I put it in an external case to use it with my macbook. It comes up fine and I can read the drive but I can not delete or mod files. Is there a way to change the permission so I can have full use of the drive?
 
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Is the drive formatted NTFS, cos Macs can only read to that format. If you want to use your drive with both PC and Mac, reformat the drive FAT32.
 
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If it's FAT32 already, try selecting the drive in the Finder then right-click Get Info; if you look towards the bottom you might be able to change ownership and permissions there.
 
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Mac Studio, M1 Max, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD
You can always simply reformat it using Disk Utility. This will write it in Mac OS X format and you will be "good to go".
 
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Yes you will i would suggest backing it up before you reformat.
 
J

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everyone keeps saying that Mac's cant write to NTFS....but I have a network drive as we speak to my 2003 server which is NTFS. I copy and create files all the time, then move them over, and modify them, rename them, and delete them.

If I didnt read so much about MAC's not being able to modify things in NTFS, i would have just thought that there was no problem at all. Works fine for me. weird.
 
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everyone keeps saying that Mac's cant write to NTFS....but I have a network drive as we speak to my 2003 server which is NTFS. I copy and create files all the time, then move them over, and modify them, rename them, and delete them.

If I didnt read so much about MAC's not being able to modify things in NTFS, i would have just thought that there was no problem at all. Works fine for me. weird.
This is a completely different animal.
In the case of a shared network drive you can read/write to NTFS since Windows is the one doing the actual writing, not your Mac.
Mac OS X can still only read an NTFS, not write to it.
 
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Ok, my data is all backed up. Now how do I reformat the old drive?

you can do it one of two ways. from a pc or a mac

mac method youll have to get from someone else cause im currently on a pc :bomb:


pc method plug in you drive and go to my computer. then find your drive and right click on it and go to format. then change the file systen to fat32 and put what ever you want in for the volume label. then click start and let it do its thing
 

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i'll take the other half of that...

on a mac, connect the drive.
go to disk utility in your utilities folder in your applications folder.
select the top evel for the external drive (this should be easily evident) and select partition.
the next steps will vary slightly depending on whether you want or already had partitions or not. but everything from here is pretty self explanitory - choose a name for the volume(s), choose a format (fat32), and sizes for partitions if you decide on having partitions at all.
once all your options are selected, click "partition" on the bottom right of the tool.
 

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