Using my old PC HD as a slave???

I recently bought a macbook, and i took my old PC HD out, and im trying to use it as an external one. but as i connect it and transfer a file on to my desktop, it says "file cannot be modified"????? so what does that mean? do i need to put my PC HD as "slave"? if so , how do I do that? or is there any other tips i can get when approaching this? thanks

Hi retrokid. I am assuming you have put the drive into an external hard drive case. In order for you to be able to use it under OSX you will need to have the drive formatted as Fat32 or HFS+. Mac dosen't see NTFS drives. So you may have to return it to the old PC and reformat to Fat 32 first.

Macs can see NTFS drives, they just can not write to them.

How do I reformat the hd to fat32 or HFS+? And which one would be a more universal format?

Hey Retrokid,

There is a Disk Utility under Applications/Utilities. It can repartition (if necessary) and reformat your drive. I actually had to do the same thing this morning (after switching over).

fat32 would of course be more "universal". HFS+ would be mac specific.

Oh ok. So would I be able to put it back into my old laptop and it would work correctly? or would I need to reformat it again back to NTFS?

The message pertaining to the file cannot be modified implies that you were opening a file from the external drive and trying to make changes to it and then saving it back to the external and is due to OS X being able to read NTFS partitions but cannot write to them.

(Just a note - being the Master or Slave has no bearing in dealing with external drives. This is an issue with multiple internal drives in a desktop machine and how they are seen by the BIOS.)

Am assuming you do know that when you partition the drive you will be erasing everything that is on it. So, "NO" you will not be able to put it back into your win PC and have it work correctly since you erased it. And, if there is anything there you want, you will need to make back ups prior to formatting.

We really need to know what you intend to do with this drive to make any proper recommendation regarding what you should do.

I really just intend to use it as an external hard drive now. To have some movies and music and such and to be able to take it with me on trips using it on my families other laptops. But if possible, I would like to keep my windows programs and such on it so that I can still be able to use it on my older laptop and not my macbook all the time.

For that situation would recommend this.

Make a complete back up of your disk.
Put the drive back into your laptop
Purchase and install this software in windows.
Use acronis to split the hard drive into 2 partitions -
the 1st large enough for all your current files plus another 5GB or so and keeping all the info on the drive in place and
then creating a 2nd partition and formatting it with FAT32.
This 2nd partition would then be accessible on your Mac and on your windows machines, while still allowing you to use it as a boot drive in your original laptop.

Note: Acronis is very good at this and I have personally used it on many occasions over the past 10 years or so, and (knock on wood) have never had it destroy data. But, anytime you are modifying partitions there is a chance of data becoming corrupted.
If you have never done any of this, it is not hard once you've done it a couple of times. But would highly recommend asking around to find someone that is comfortable with it and maybe walking you through it.

alright ill try that out. Thanks man