External Hard Drive question

I just purchased a MacBook Pro (First time user) and I want to edit and my photo's stored on my Maxtor External Hard Drive that was previously used with Windows XP to store and edit my pictures with. My question is when I hooked it up to my MacBook Pro it recognized the drive and all the files in it, but I get an error message when I try to edit or delete any of the files using my MP.
One more newbie question, which photo editing software (besides Photoshop) do you use. I looking at Adobe Lightroom or Aperture 2.0. This is my first Mac purchase and I love it.

have you tried to copy the images onto your MBP hard drive and then tried to edit them?

What is the format on the external hard drive, if its NTFS, then OS X can read it, but not write. So you won't be able to make any changes to it. You'll have to copy the data on it, reformat it, and copy it back if you want to use it with the Mac.

Yeah, the external HD was used on a WinXP computer and is formated NTFS. I think it's better off just buying this thing it's own new hard drive. What format would I need to set the new hard drive too to have it read and write to it?

NFS+ journaled. But then you can't plug it into a pc and use it there. Hard drives are weird because they do not cross platforms easily. There are some programs people might suggest so you can read and write to NTFS but I do NOT recommend them at all....i almost lost 13 thousand mp3s!!! good thing they were on my ipod. I would just backup all your files onto your laptop then go to disk utility and reformat your drive, then drag your files back on and you will be good to go.

The above posters are correct Mac OS cannot write to NTFS but it can read. There are a few solutions

1. Backup all your files somewhere else and reformat to HFS Journaled
a. Mac can read and write
b. Windows cannot read or write
c. no size limitations

2. Use a program that allows for cross platform hard drives (I do not recommend this)

3. Leave the drive attached to the windows computer and share it on the network, (or reformat for HFS plug it into the Mac and share it from there, either way will work depending on where you want it plugged in) and use the network to access it from the Mac. File systems to not matter over networks.
a. Both Mac and PC can read and write
b. It is nice not to need it directly connected.
c. Speed will be limited by your network

4. Backup all data and reformat as Fat32. Windows and Mac can both read and write to this file system. Most external drives come pre-formatted as Fat32. There are a few limitations though...
a. Depending on the OS it may have maximum partition sizes, such as with Windows 2000 the max partition size is 32GB but with XP and Mac I do not believe there are any limitations.
b. Max file size is 4GB, there are a few workarounds for this just search google you will find them.
c. I believe there is a maximum file name length.
d. Directories have limitations on number of files able to be put into them (solution: just make more directories)

I hope this helps, and gives you a few options.

For basic editing if you are just a casual photo guy use iPhoto, for pro use Photoshop.

TheInvsbleMan said:

The above posters are correct Mac OS cannot write to NTFS but it can read. There are a few solutions

Click to expand...

Might be true but I have a WD netcenter (NAS) and I can read and write from my Macbook Pro. I dont know what FS it is but I used to use it with my Xp/ubuntu machines the same way before i got the MBP.

Remember I did no special config changes to make this work.

Exactly... when a hard drive is on the network, the FS does not matter at all. but when it is directly connected it does.

There are ways to make the Mac read/write to NTFS volumes. I do so on my MacBook.

It's a whole lot easier than copying and formatting and copying back... and it's cheaper than buying another drive! I think it's MacFUSE and the NTFS-3G driver. Install Fuse, then the driver and you have read/write access to NTFS volumes. (note: Time Machine will NOT work with it, though)

Here's a good page about it:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html