1394 Hard Drive 'Ownership & Permissions'

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Lamont_Dennis

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I have a 1394 HD that I like to take back and forth to work but when I hook it up to my Mac and try to put files on it I get: the item "filename" could not be moved because "DISK2_VOL1" cannot be modified.

In the DISK2_VOL1 Ownership & Permissions it says 'You can only read'
Is there a way to change this?

The 1394 HD was originally used on a PC and I'd like to be able to use it on both my PC & Mac since I'm now using both. Is this possible?
 
I think your external drive has been reformatted on the PC, and is now an NTFS volume. If that is the case, then 'you can only read' that drive, and you will not be able to write files, or even modify any files on that drive from the Mac. This has nothing to do with permissions, it's the file structure on an NTFS drive. There is no way around this limitation if the drive is an NTFS volume. If you need to use this on both PC and Mac, then connect to the PC, and reformat as a FAT32 volume. (you have to completely erase the drive to do this, so back up anything that needs it before proceeding) - When you do that - Then both systems will be able to read and write to the drive.
 
FAT32 <--Ouch!

The HD IS currently NTFS. I did it NTFS to get over the 4GB file limit in Windows. I do Video & DVD's so that's big to me. I guess I'll have to re-think that one.

I'm putting together a Firewire RAID (2x 250Gig HD's)... I'm still doing research on this thought but:
-- Should I also format the Drives that will be in my 1394 Raid to FAT32 to be sure it's PC & Mac compatible?
-- Does Mac also have the 4GB file limit?
 
I don't know anything about RAID cross-platform.
If you want a really big FAT32 volume, the Mac can do it. (volume as large as 127 GB, I think. The only limitation is with the FAT32 format. I think MS decided at some point to force large drives to NTFS in Windows. Heres some Terminal tips for making a big FAT32 volume:
MS-DOS fat32 format with Disk Utility -
Go into Disk Utility, right-click on the drive you want to format, and select Info. Notice what the disk identifier is (for example, "disk3"). Click on the Partition tab, and remove all the partitions for that drive (careful here, you can't hose your boot partition, but any others are open season).
Then, open your terminal:
fdisk -i -a dos /dev/rdisk# (where # is the disk number you got above)

That creates a new partition, full size (up to 127GB), with auto sector sizes and such. Now you need to format it:
newfs_msdos -F 32 /dev/rdisk#s1
You can optionally specify a volume name with:
newfs_msdos -F 32 -v volname /dev/rdisk#s1
- - volname is whatever name you want in DOS 8.3 rules.

Note that the capital "F" is critical. Lower-case "f" means something else.
You can always use fdisk /dev/rdisk# without anything else to see what the current info is for that disk.

Bet you didn't know that you can fdisk from the Mac!
 
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