[frankmcma]

I have had a USB hard drive (works on Mac and PC) hooked up to my PC..works fine. I plugged it into my G5 and it pops right up and I can access it fine..however I can't save to it. When I move a folder to it it says:

The item "folder" could not be moved because "Data" cannot be modified

Data is the drive name. Under ownership and permissions sure enough it says I can only read from the drive.

I REALLY don't want to reformat...how can I set the drive to I can write to it and still keep all the data on it?

Thanks!
Frank

[shinji]

It's not formatted as NTFS is it?

[frankmcma]

I believe it is yes

[peeb]

Well, Mac OSX can read, but not write NTFS.
You need to reformat to a Mac filesystem like HFS+, or to FAT32 (which is not ideal, but can be read and written by pcs and Macs).

[frankmcma]

Excellent info..thanks!

Is there a Mac format that I can use, that can also be read by a PC in case I want to plug it back in the PC? (aside from using Fat32)

Frank

[peeb]

No. Not unless you use specific PC software that can read Mac formats. It's available, but I have never used any. Use FAT32 - it sounds like it will work for you, the only real drawback is the 4gb filesize limit.

[frankmcma]

Awesome...thanks!

[tomrock]

The Windows software to read mac drives is called MacDrive -- I've used it and it works well but in this instance you're better off just using fat32.

[mfbernstein]

Or you can use FUSE with ntfs-3g which can read and write NTFS on OS X. FAT32 is a decent solution, but only if you don't have files bigger than 4GB, and don't use special characters in filenames.

[frankmcma]

Thanks for the tips!