Western Digital passport portable hard drive with MAC problem?

John

I put files onto the hard drive from my PC with Windows XP. When I plug it into my MacBook with the latest version of OS X, nothing happens. The light comes on but the hard drive doesnt spin and nothing comes up on the OS X desktop. How do I get this to work?

Answer
The drive is most likely formatted NTFS, which is a proprietary Microsoft format.

You can try using Disk Utility on the Mac to mount it, but even if it works it will be read-only.

If you need to move files back and forth from PC to Mac using this drive, you are better off reformatting it FAT32. Keep in mind though, that FAT32 only supports file sizes up to 4GB.

peace


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Mac Portable Hard Drive Help?

h8thecause

I recently bought a SimpleTech portable hard drive. Its a 160gb if that matters. I am working on trying to backup my music by dragging and dropping it on there, but when I plug it in and try to drag, it does not allow me. When I view the info for the portable hard drive, the sharing and permissions says: "I can only read". How would I fix this?

Answer
Check whether the hard disk has "Write Lock". If it is so make sure it is not write locked.

Make sure that the Hard Drive is not formatted as NTFS. Mac does not support writing data to a NTFS volume. Just right click the mounted volume in Finder and select "Get Info". In the Info window check for the "Format:". In case the format is NTFS, it shows "Windows NT Filesystem". [ http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/attachments/maccar/40138d1172094097-using-external-hd-between-mac-pc-picture-1.png ].
If it is so, your Mac will not allow you to write data to that volume.

There are 2 solutions :
1. Make Mac write data to NTFS volume : Install 3rd party NTFS support for Mac. Softwares like "Paragon NTFS" [ http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ ] allows you to write data to NTFS volume.
2. Reformat the hard disk to Mac Compatible format : This will require you to erase the entire data present in the disk. You can use Disk Utility to reformat the hard disk. If you are not sharing it with Windows PC, you can format it with format as "HFS+" (referred as "Mac OS Extended" in disk utility). In case you intend to share it with Windows "Fat32" will be the format I would recommend. Remember Fat32 does not support files larger than 4GB.

I would recommend the second solution.

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How can I partition my portable hard drive to save files both from my MAC and from an old PC?

portable hard drive read only on mac image

mr blonde7

I just want to save a ton of files from my MAC to my portable hard drive and if possible, also save files from my PC. I was told the hard drive can be 'partitioned' but have no idea how. I'm fairly clueless regarding all things tech so please use keep it simple LOL.

Answer
You have two options.

1) You can format the drive to FAT32 (MS-DOS in OSX) to make it both PC and Mac compatible. This will allow it to be used on both types of system without partitioning. This is the best option, except that this format won't allow file transfers of single files larger than 4GB in size.

2) You can follow the link below to learn how to use Disk Utility to partition your drive, created two partitions on the one drive, format one for Windows(NTFS) and one for OSX(Max OS Journaled). This will give you storage space for both Operating Systems, but you wouldn't be able to copy items between the systems. By default, OSX cannot read and write a NTFS drive, and Windows cannot read and write to a Mac OS Journaled drive.

http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/diskutilitypart.htm

How do I change Portable/External Hard Drive permission?

Silver Sha

I need to copy some movies and games onto my friends Portable/External Hard Drive using my mac. But the permissions are set to "Read only" and I need to change it to "Read and Write". How do I do this?

Answer
Go to the properties of that Device...

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