Backing up files to external hard disc.

R

RickyMac

Registered
Hi, I have just purchased an iMac G5 and when I plug the external hard drive caddy that I used to back up iTunes and music on my PC my mac will not allow me to modify it. I can get files from the external drive onto the mac but I cannot back up files I download from the mac onto the drive. It says 'new volume cannot be modified'. Can anyone tell me where I am going wrong? I would really appreciate it, thanks

Ricky
 
If you control-click the drive as mounted on the desktop, then slect Get Info, the information box should open. About three-fourths of the way down should be something called Ownership and Permissions. If you open that, you should see a drop down list that probably indicates Read Only. It may be possible to use that list to change the permissions to Read and Write.

The problem might also be due to the format of the external drive. Mac OS X can read[write to FAT formatted drives but not NTFS. If you are going to use it only with your Mac, copy all the files up to your Mac. Then use Disk Utility to reformat it.
 
If I bring up the info for the external drive it does say 'read only' under permissions. It doesn't let me change that though. I am new to macs, how do I format using the Disc utility?

Cheers,

Ricky
 
Open the Finder, then go to the Applications directory. Then look for the Utilities folder. Disk Utility will be in there. Select the external drive in the left hand side bar. Then click the Erase button. Go with the default choice for formatting which should be Mac HFS Extended (journaled). Then click the Erase button. That should do it.

BEWARE: This will wipe out all the data on the drive. Be sure to copy any files on it that you wish to save to your Mac so that you can copy them back later.
 
Thanks, I seem to be getting somewhere now. When I select the disc in utilities it only brings up the MS-DOS under erase and cannot be changed. I'm a little confused though because it shows the external disc twice on the left and it only lets you change the formatting options for one of them?!?

Ricky
 
Click the little "Options" button at the bottom of the window, and change it to the Apple format. Then you'll be able to select HFS+ as a disk format.
 
I have managed to format the disc using disc utilities. I selected the option Mac OS extended (jornaled). Now the disc cannot even be read by the computer and when I go to first aid it says cannot run due to error.

Does anyone know how to rescue this disc?

All help would be appreciated...

Ricky
 
i recently purchased a maxtor 3200
its really a nice back up for my pc
i bought itto transfer proggies to the mac.
i would like to mod. the hard disk so that i can
transfer mac files to it also.
i would like to partition, but
i do not want to format the drive which
will erase all of my precious files.
is there any way around this.
I know about the permissions,
but it only says that i can read.
I am really aggrivated about this.
can someone give advice?
 
When i decided to share the same disk with PC i decided to force Microsoft once to conform to the Mac. So I formatted the drive HFS+ (from the Mac) and for Windows XP I installed MacDrive so the PC could write to it, even with long files names.
 
so this will install some kind of format so that the mac will be able to
write to the pc based hard drive? Does this install on the pc?
I guess I should have read further. I will look into this.
Is this the only method you know of to get the external drive
to read and write on the mac?
thanks
n
 
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