external hard drive help????

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Last seen: 16 years 10 months ago
Joined: Apr 30 2007 - 15:02
Posts: 12
external hard drive help????

hi there guys, dont know if its in the right place but.....

i have just bought a http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-2980.aspx and i am having huge problems getting it working basically! i have rang the technical helpline, they will ring me back on monday!!!!!!!!!!!!! i thought someone on here may be able to help me before then?

anyway, the problem;

i connected it to the mac, nothing happened but disk utility came up (which incidently i cannot find now???) and i could see the hard drive, but couldnt do anything atall to it!

so after a few attempts i got bored and connected it to the pc, i was given the option to format it, which i did and gave it a name etc, i then connected it to the mac, then i could see it on the desktop and see the files on it, great, it works!!! no!

i cannot writ to it atall off the mac which is useless as thats all i bought it for, i want it to have nothing to do with the pc atall, but ive spoiled that already!!!! any ideas? can anyone help me get this working on my mac at all? cheers!

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Last seen: 2 years 4 months ago
Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
Posts: 1100
couple things

Macs now can read native ntfs format, but not write to it.
If you want to be able to read and write from both PC and Mac, reformat the drive as FAT32.

Disk Utility lives in the Utilities folder, in the Application folder, at the root of the system drive:
/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility

I'd recommend reformatting in FAT32 from the Mac, using Disk Utility.
OR make 2 partitions, one for HFS+ (for the Mac), and one in FAT32 (for the PC). Both will be able to read and write from the FAT32 partition, but only Mac will see the HFS+ (short of adding extra software to the Windows install to allow it to mount HFS+).

HFS+ has some nice journaling features. Anyone, feel free to explain further what this means.

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Last seen: 16 years 10 months ago
Joined: Apr 30 2007 - 15:02
Posts: 12
cheers for that, so it can be

cheers for that, so it can be done, the only thing is that now when i connect it to the mac i have no permissions to do anything, so i cannot reformat whilst connected to the mac?
im only bothered about being able to write onto it via the mac as i have only bought it really to back up my mac whilst i do a overhaul on it! Wink

got the disk utility now! Wink

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