I ma having Major Weird Problems with my External Harddrive and my New Mac HELP!!!

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ok so here is the deal. I have a 160gb WD My Book external hard drive. When i plug it inot my xp laptop it works fine, but when i plug it into my brand new iMac i cant copy anything onto it and it says its read only.
I am willing to reformat my external harddrive when its connected ot my mac so its more compadable to my mac but i cant figure out how to do this can anyone help me out (sorry this is my first mac)

Thanks Guys!!
-Adam
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Al iMac 20" 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
If it is formatted in NTFS under Windows, OS X can only read from it.

You need to reformat as FAT32 on your PC.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro M1 • iPhone 14 Pro • iPad Pro • iMac Retina 27"
Be aware that reformatting will erase everything on the external drive.

With that in mind:

Go to Applications --> Utilities --> Disk Utility

In the pane on the left, select your external drive (be sure not to select your internal drive, which will have a name like "Macintosh HD").

In the pane on the right, at the top center, click "Erase."

If you want to use the external drive on both your PC and your Mac, choose "MS DOS File System." If you want to use it only on your Mac, choose "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)."

Click "Erase."

It will run for a minute, and then the computer will automatically mount your drive. You're done!
 
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Since it seems you still have a Windows box. You may want to check out PartitionMagic. It has the ability to convert NTFS to FAT32, the latter being able to be read by both Mac OSx and Windows.

Cheers Brad
 

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