External hard drive privileges...

W

wonton2112

Registered
Hello!
I'm having a bit of trouble with my new external hard drive. I just bought an external box, so I could keep using the files from my old pc on my mac mini... Sadly, I put the sata drive in, connected it with the usb cable, and while my machine recognizes it, I can't delete anything, or move anything on the external as it claims I don't have sufficient priviliges. Thank you in advance!
Wonton2112
PS you get a cookie if you can help me fix it!
 
Your hard drive in the external case is formatted NTFS. You can read the files on that disk, but you can't make changes. This is not a privileges, or permissions problem. Microsoft provides only read-access from other operating systems to NTFS drives. You can't fix it, except by copying all the files off the drive, and deleting the NTFS partition, and creating a new partition (either FAT32, if you still want to access the drive from a PC - or just create a MacOS Extended format if you will only use with the Mac), and copying all the files back to the new partition.
 
Microsoft doesn't provide specifications of NTFS, so the open-source NTFS Unix filesystem that OS X uses does not offer write access. At least, Apple doesn't enable it. Because if there are bugs, and there likely are, your data could be scrambled. That would be bad.

** If you format the external drive as Mac OS X Extended with Journaling (HFS + with journaling), the external drive will no longer be accessible by a Microsoft Windows machine. ** If you must access it by both your Mac and a Windows machine you have two choices:

1. Free but not so great: Instead of formatting the drive as Mac OS X Extended with Journaling, format it as FAT (File Allocation Table, the old DOS filesystem). However, FAT is limited to a certain size that I can't remember at this point. Maybe 32 gigs. So you may have to use multiple partitions. This IS a good option for USB flash drives, I suppose. They're smaller than hard drives. And FAT would work well enough.

2. Not free: Look for MacDrive, MacDisk and others, software that can read Mac formatted drives in Windows. I'm not sure which one is the best. Maybe MacDrive???

Good luck.

[Edit: Some of this is redundant to DeltaMac's post. Sorry!]

Doug
 
Hello: I bought a 320gb external hard drive that is supposedly PC and MAC compatible. I tried to install Mac OS Tiger on it, but it won't let me. There is an exclamation point over the drive when you try to install it. The external is recognized and shows up on my desktop, but can't put the operating system on it. I tried reformatting it to HFS Journaled and partitioned it with 3 partitions and that didn't work either. Does anyone have any suggestions that might help? Thanks. Lori
 
If you have a USB connection to the hard drive, Macs mostly cannot use a USB device to boot the Mac. That could explain why you cannot install the OS X on that drive, because you can't boot from it.
A newer Mac with Intel processor can boot to a USB drive, but you must format the disk properly through the Disk Utility.

The drive will be sold as Mac compatible, because you can store files on the drive from a Mac with no problem, but you can't install OS X on that drive. This is a good reason to look for a FireWire/USB drive, as that would solve your problem.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top