[Tigris67]

Hi guys. I just recently boughta 250gig external hard drive that I have been using on my PC laptop and it works just fine. But recently I brought it to my computer courses in college and its have some problems. Whenever I plug it in, It seems to pop up under drives and I can open files from the drive absolutely fine. But I just cannot save a darned thing to it or drag and drop anything in the external. Is it the fact that its formated NTFS? One of my friends said I might try partitioning the drive and making one part of it formated to "FAT32" or something like that, but would that make work for a Mac computer? any help is appreciated guys, and thankyou for the input.

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No mac should read the NTFS if you were to repartiton on would choose just plain old FAT that is how most thumb drives are formatted.
Have you checked the read write on the drive. click on the drive hold the control key and click again go to mor info and down the very bottom it has the access setup. Do you have read write access?

[peterm]

No mac should read the NTFS if you were to repartiton on would choose just plain old FAT that is how most thumb drives are formatted.
Have you checked the read write on the drive. click on the drive hold the control key and click again go to mor info and down the very bottom it has the access setup. Do you have read write access?

[Tigris67]

I don't quite understand what you mean when you said to CTR+click. I tried that and nothing happened really. I don't really see an option called access setup.But you said Macs will not read NTFS formatted drives? is that true?

Thanks again!

[Tigris67]

I don't quite understand what you mean when you said to CTR+click. I tried that and nothing happened really. I don't really see an option called access setup.But you said Macs will not read NTFS formatted drives? is that true?

Thanks again!

[peterm]

ok pick any icon for the external drive.
click once to highlight then hold the control key down and click again.(works like right click in windows)
this will give a drop down menu.Click on get info . This will give another drop down menu. Down the bottom it will have Ownership and permissions. It will show if you can read and write. If you can repartition your drive and make one part FAT (not 16 or 32 just FAT) it will work smoother.
I said mac osx WILL read NTFS as I can read my ntfs xp drive from my mac.

[Tigris67]

ahh, I see...Well what I ended up doing was repartitioning 10 gigs of the drive to FAT32 and I went down to one of the computer labs to hook it up to a Mac and see what would happen. I was going to Convert it to FAT but it told me I could only partition 2gigs worth which really did not seem worth it. But anyway, the Mac actually recognizes the FAT32 and I can save and open files from it, hurray! The NTFS is still not functioning properly but its ok, the partition was successful and my problem is basically solved so thankyou peterm for your suggestions. Could not have gotten this far without your help.

this has become my new favorite website whenever it comes to computer questions or problems! =).

[peterm]

yes it can be a bug writing to NTFS thats why we went for Fat you should be able to read NTFS without problems. If I get a fix I will let you know (as soon as I get my mac working again)

[peterm]

Did you get a limit size when you used FAT32 if yes then use the Mac disk partition program and pick DOS this will format it as FAT 32 without the fat32 limit promblem