windos external hd on a mac?

10driver · Aug 19, 2007

hey gang, can anyone tell me a probably super simple answer, how can i transfer files from my mac to a windows formatted hard drive?
i do not want to reformat the drive for mac, just make a one time file transfer
thanks
10driver

schweb · Aug 19, 2007

Plug the drive in and drag the files to it just like any other drive.

As long as the drive is FAT formatted and not NTSF it will work just fine.

eric · Aug 19, 2007

even if it is NTSF, you can copy to your heart's content, you just won't be able to move, modify, or delete the files.

you can always reformat FAT32 (or better yet, partition both HFS+ and FAT32 logical drives onto it) once all your critical data has been copied.

10driver · Aug 19, 2007

i'm getting a window that says the file could not be moved because the drive could not be modified
the drive belongs to a computer illiterate friend and i'm smart enough to buy a mac but not to use it to its potential yet

schweb · Aug 19, 2007

eric said:
even if it is NTSF, you can copy to your heart's content, you just won't be able to move, modify, or delete the files.

you can always reformat FAT32 (or better yet, partition both HFS+ and FAT32 logical drives onto it) once all your critical data has been copied.

If he's copying to an NTFS drive, I thought that wouldn't work? OSX can only read NTFS not write to it. Or at least that's what I thought.

cwa107 · Aug 19, 2007

schweb said:
If he's copying to an NTFS drive, I thought that wouldn't work? OSX can only read NTFS not write to it. Or at least that's what I thought.

You are correct, the Mac doesn't support writes/modifications to an NTFS formatted partition. The simple alternative is to format it FAT32, but if you need to keep the data on it, you can try MacFUSE to add NTFS write support capability to OS X.

eric · Aug 19, 2007

yeah, i read it backwards. my bad.