external hard drive for mac

Aloha! I have a mac book air and have an external hard drive with all files from my old pc laptop. I am wanting to move some files over and create my iTunes library but my mac will not share with this external hard drive. Everything is locked and when i go to "get info" once i click on my external hard drive under finder it says for the sharing & permissions that I can only read.

Does anyone know how I change this or how to make it compatible with mac? I am trying to click on a folder and drag it to desktop and it won't let me do this I am totally lost and frustrated.

Thanks!!

Aloha. The drive's probably formatted NTFS. Which means that the Mac will only be able to read it. There is no native write support for NTFS (it's a windows file system), there are some 3rd party applications that enable write support though. I don't use them personally, so my practice would be to reformat it either as a HFS+ drive (Mac native), or as FAT. All of this will be dependent on if you have a windows machine you're looking to share it with.

mac newbie here too, but this is something that ive come across. what i found out was that if its not formatted for mac, it will be read only. what i ended up having to do was copy stuff from that drive to my laptop (windows 7) format the external drive on my mac (formatted for mac) and then copy the stuff back to the drive. after that, i was able to copy stuff from the drive to my mac. there might be an easier way, but thats what i did.

Thanks!

Thanks for your advice! I found some youtube tutorials on how to reformat the external hard drive I need to wait til I am back around my pc so I can save data on there, reformat the disk, put it back on the disk then get it on the mac

lanaisurfergirl said:

Thanks for your advice! I found some youtube tutorials on how to reformat the external hard drive I need to wait til I am back around my pc so I can save data on there, reformat the disk, put it back on the disk then get it on the mac

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Let us know how it works out for you. I have to do this but keep pushing it off