External hard drive editing problems

A

alekche

Registered
Hi,
I bought an external hard drive (shall we call him Jerry - generic average quality, 60gb) and pluged it into a PC in order to upload some music. That went just fine, without the need to install the software provided.

I then plugged Jerry into my friends G4 which had no problems recognising it and copying/opening files from it, but it will let me edit it.

I have not instaleled the software supplied but I am not sure if that woudl be it, the G4 does have all the necessary specs in order to work just fine.

Suggestions.
Cheers
Alekche
 
If the hard drive is formatted as NTFS, then it is read-only under Mac OS X (and, hence, is why you can't change/delete/move anything on the drive).

FAT32 is a good cross-platform format (readable/writable on both Windows and Mac with some limitations), while HFS+ is the standard Mac-only format.
 
Thanks for that, I guess it's a learning experience.

A stupid question, please excuse me. How do I reformat the drive? Do I need to install a particular software? Where can I download the bits and bobs?

Alekche
 
You can use Disk Utility, in your Utilities folder (inside Applications, or choose Utilities form the "Go" menu in Finder). Click the "Erase" tab and go from there.
 
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