Help with external hard drive

I have a Vantec external hard drive that i was using on pc but now i'm using with my brand new macbook. But it won't let me do anything to it and in get info, my permissions say read-only. How do I change this to do what I want with it?

shadowborn11 said:

I have a Vantec external hard drive that i was using on pc but now i'm using with my brand new macbook. But it won't let me do anything to it and in get info, my permissions say read-only. How do I change this to do what I want with it?

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It sounds like the drive was formatted with your PC, and if that's true, it's likely formatted with the NTFS filesystem. Mac OS X doesn't support writing to an NTFS volume by default. If you can reformat the drive, do so on the Mac and choose "MS-DOS" as the filesystem type. It will then be compatible with both your PC and Mac.

If you have data you can't afford to lose on the drive, you might want to check out MacFUSE, which enables OS X to write and modify NTFS-formatted drives.

Thanks for the help, I installed MacFUSE but...now what do I do? I just got a mac today so consider me a super newb...

shadowborn11 said:

Thanks for the help, I installed MacFUSE but...now what do I do? I just got a mac today so consider me a super newb...

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Honestly, it's not a very straightforward process, which is why I first recommended just reformatting the drive as MS-DOS.

This tutorial should get you started, but it's not something I would try as a complete newbie.

Thanks a lot. I'll try to figure it out...

I'm just gonna transfer the files I need from the hard drive and then reformat it.

If I can get some help on this... what is compile? Is it just the process of installing the program? And also what is the binary .dmg?

Actually nvm. I just realized I don't need to do anything to copy the files onto internal drive. So after I'm done copying everything, I'll just reformat it.

Now...is there any websites that can help me through the reformatting process in macs? haha thanks in advance.

shadowborn11 said:

Actually nvm. I just realized I don't need to do anything to copy the files onto internal drive. So after I'm done copying everything, I'll just reformat it.

Now...is there any websites that can help me through the reformatting process in macs? haha thanks in advance.

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You can format the drive using Disk Utility, which is located in Applications => Utilities. Select the drive and click the Erase tab. Then, choose MS-DOS as the Volume Format and click Erase.

Also, to answer your previous question, compiling is the process of converting a computer programming language (text) into an executable program (binary).