[Quantum Flux]

i am a total mac newbie.

I have attached my 60gb usb external hard-disk to my new poermac (my first mac) and while i can read and copy files from it i can't copy anything to it.

when i drag a file over it says "the disk can not be modified".

i noticed a little pencil with a line through it in the bottom left corner of the wondow which i assume means write ability is off. tried clickiing it but nothing. so how do i enable the disk to be written to?

thanks

[mduell]

The external disk is probably formatted using NTFS. OSX can read NTFS, but cannot write to it.

To enable Windows and OSX to read/write to your external disk, you'll need to reformat it as FAT32 in OSX. This will erase all data on the disk, so be sure to copy everything off first.

[westrock]

Most USB drives (actually all I've used) are FAT32 format from the showroom. I think Right Click > Get Info... will tell you what it is.


I have had a similar problem with iTunes where it can't modify certain songs. In every instance the Unix level permissions were set wrong.

Open a Terminal and try going to /Volumes/ I think it is, do a "ls -l" and you should see your various drives. See on the left if you see something that looks like;

lrwxrwxrwx
drwxrwxrwx
-rwxrw-rw-

Something like that. All the folders should be set to rwxrwxrwx for Read/Write/Execute. The three groups of rwx are for owner, group, and other. To change them you would (as root) type "chmod a=rwx foldername". You may also go into the USB drive and check the folders itself.

You may be able to do all that stuff from Right Click > Get Info...

[tooki]

Yes, just use Get Info rather than monkeying with the Terminal. It displays things in a way that make a lot more sense.

HOWEVER: FAT doesn't support file/folder permissions, so that can't be the problem.

My guess is that it's an NTFS-formatted disk.

tooki