Blow Dog

Hi,

I've recently bought a 250gb external firewire/USB2 hard disk.
It was formatted on a PC for storing various data.

However, when I plug it into my MAC, I can only read, not read/write!?

Can anyone help? I've got a crap load of data on the MAC that I need to back up.

Cem

Markus

Cem,
What OS version is the Mac running?

If it is OS X, it sounds as though permissions may be set so you don't have write access to the disk. You'd want to select the drive in the finder, then use the "get info" command, and have a look at the "ownership and permissions" and make sure Owner,Group and Everyone have Read & Write access.

Alternatively, you could enable the "Ignore ownership on this volume" which might resolve the issue as well.

Blow Dog

I tried that (Apple + I) but the permissions are greyed out as being "Read Only".

class_A

Did you format it as NTFS or FAT32? IIRC, Win XP won't format disks over 32Gb in anything other than NTFS. Format it as FAT32 using Disk Utility on the Mac in /Applications/Utilities (assuming you're on OS X). I don't know where NTFS support is up to on the Mac so this could be your issue.

EDIT: A quick Google shows that OS X's NTFS driver is read only so I'm guessing that's where your problem may lie. Linux distro's get around this by wrapping the x86 Windows code but as we're still on PowerPC we don't have that option yet

Markus

Cem,
If it's greyed out then it's saying that you don't have access to change the permissions. To the right of the "owner" name field there should be a padlock icon, click it and it should prompt for a name and password, enter a local administrator account name and password, then click on the "owner" popup to change it to the name of that account, then see if you can change the other options.

You could also run Disk Utility, select the disk, and try "repair disk" and "repair permissions" see if that changes anything.

The only other thing I can think of, and I had this with a partition on my mac (not sure why though) is that the disk is locked. Now, Disk Utility under OS X has no options about resetting the "write protected" flag on a disk, and I could not find another way of changing it. What I had to do was boot into OS 9, then unmount the drive, run OS 9 Drive Setup software, select the disk, select "Volume options" or "Customize volumes" from the "Functions" menu, then select the drive from dialog that appears, then uncheck the "write protected" option. click OK a couple of times, quite Drive Setup, Volia, unlocked drive. Then boot into OS X and it's fine.

Blow Dog

Thanks a lot Markus - I'll try that.

I would just format the drive, but I've got a lot of stuff on there as it is.