# USB Hard Drive "cannot be modified"



## jamalicious (Apr 3, 2006)

Hey,

I'm new to macs so sorry if this is a stupid question.  But I have a USB hard drive that i've been using for a while on my pc, and when i got my mac i wanted to copy some of my files from it onto my new comp and back some things from my mac up.  When i plug it in I can see the hd icon apear on the desktop and i can open it up and view files and copy files from my hd to the mac.  But when I try and copy files from my mac to my hd it says "the item [filename] could not be moved because "USBHD" cannot be modified".  It works fine on my other comps (both pc's) anyone have any ideas?

Thanks


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## Satcomer (Apr 4, 2006)

Very simple answer. OS X can not write to Windows NTFS setup drives (thanks to Microsoft closed format). Only read from it. For the Mac to write to the disk it would have to be formatted to a FAT32 format for a Mac to write to it.


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