Disabling 'Read Only' on external HDD- HELP!

[fracknfruck]

I purchased a new External HDD today, model is a wiretek 3.5"HDD v2.0 compatible with SE/ME/2000/XP/Mac os8.6/9.x/10.x

my powerbook G4 will see the hard drive and i can copy from the windows computer onto the hard drive, then when i connect to the powerbook it will see the drive fine and let me copy the files on there to the mac but i can put them back on again. it is set to read only, so i can do anything with the drive apart from put anything on it, i have absolutely no idea how to resolve this and have to fix it asap as it is for digital effects for a show so i have a major deadline. someone please help me, i am totally clueless. i am, a newy converted (from pc) user.

 

[Satcomer]

The drive seems to formatted for Windows NTFS which is a CLOSED Microsoft file format. So Mac OS X (and Linux) can only read NTFS formatted disks.


My answer with a Windows machine on my little network was to install the shareware for Windows called MacDrive. I then formatted a shared external with the native OS X formated (Mac OS Extended). This way both the Mac and the PC can read/write to the drive.

 

[nixgeek]

The other option would be to copy the contents back to your Mac, reformat the drive FAT32, and then copy the contents back to the external drive. While NTFS is read-only on other non-MS operating systems, FAT32 is supported by pretty much everything.

Another solution is the project called MacFUSE was just recently announced and is available on the Google Code page (link). This allows you to read and write to many filesystems like those supported in Linux, as well as read-write to NTFS (ntfs-3g). If you do go this route, backup your data in case something goes wrong.