External Hard drive for Mac

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stephensmia

New Member
Hey guys I have never used a mac in my life and I just got one. I am have a problem when I connect an external hard drive to it. I can only read from it I am unable to write to so how do I fix that.
 
yeh man you need to reformat it so that it uses fat32 or something as mac cannot currently read to ntfs which im guessing it is currently formatted in.
 
if you share the drive over a network SMB doesn't care what file system you use, you can then read/write full access to the drive. You can't natively and locally write to NTFS, but you can if you install NTFS.progs from bombich's website. I used it to image dual booting macs that run windows, and of course run it on an NTFS partition. It works, but its in beta stages so don't be surprised if something goes awry.
 
how do I use my mac book to format a drive. where do I go to do that I cant seem to find any options that allow my to format it.
 
stephensmia said:
how do I use my mac book to format a drive. where do I go to do that I cant seem to find any options that allow my to format it.
Click to expand...

/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility

then hit the erase tab, select your HD and erase it. However, if you use FAT32 be aware that it is less stable and only allows a maximum file size of 4gigs. So, if you were to lets say back up a whole DVD, it wouldn't do it because it would be 4.7Gigs.

or in terminal.app

Code: 
diskutil eraseDisk msdos /Volumes/nameofvolume newname

Obviously you must fill in the blanks on that code if you do it in terminal, but the GUI would be easier.
 
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