External Hard Drive

[acsparky]

Hi, Complete novice to a mac.. PC user for a long time! Had my mac pro just a few days!
Ok, so the problem! I've got a maxtor usb external hard drive, which i know is only read only since it was used on my pc!
Read a few posts about macFUSE etc... and got completely lost trying to install all the relevant software to go with it! Can someone please talk me through how to do it...... in English.....!!!! Thanks very much for a great site!

 

[teapot]

Hi aspaky
1: Does your external drive appear on the desktop?
2: Which operating system are you using?
3: Do you want to keep what you have on the drive?
I only have knowledge of things Apple, Microsoft is still a complete mystery to me. Should you want it there id no reason why your external drive cannot be read / write. I hope this may prompt you to come baqck and enjoy your Mac

 

[Sariah]

Hello, and welcome to the wonderful world of not-PC.

I recently got an external hard drive that did pretty much the same thing. I tried to drag stuff onto it, but a message popped up that said it couldn't be modified because it was read only. This apparently happened because it was set up to respond to PCs primarily... or something.

My external HD is Seagate, but I imagine that it's a similar problem. What I had to do was partition the external hard drive. (I don't know why, I just know it worked.)

Here is the link for the Seagate information: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/knowledge_base/

I don't know how this will work, seeing as you got your's from a different company, but it's a place to start. Hope you're able to work it out!

 

[acsparky]

Hi and thanks for the replies!

In response to your questions teapot, it appears on the desktop, but only as an orange usb symbol! I have just loaded the Leopard operating system! And finally, all the usefull stuff on the drive i have backed up anyway, so no, not bothered what happens to files on there!
Thanks Sariah, I will give it a go!!

PS teapot... am loving my mac already!!! Thanks all.....

 

[Egidio]

The icon color you described sounds to me like a FireWire drive, not USB.

Do you want to save the files currently stored in the drive? If not, you can probably reformat it.

 

[LightGear]

If you want to format the HD go into your apps folder then to utilities folder and open diskutilities and you can reformat it there

 

[acsparky]

Thanks for your help. As Lightgear said.. Utilities and disk utilities.. re-formatted and now works perfectly... Got Time Machine set up on it now... well happy!!