another iMac question!

[chickenbub]

for those who have Mac's. I have found that my external hard drives can easily be read on my iMac but I cannot write to or edit files on it because it uses a different file system than Windows? Is there an easy away around this? An app that I can add to my iMac to be able to do this? or do I have to reformat all my external hard drives? MAJOR PITA as I have 5 externals, 2 x 1tb, 1 x 750g and 1 x 500g...so where am I going to store all the info on them while reformatting?? HELP. Maybe I should join a Mac forum for this one? I doubt MOC has the time to help me with this so close to Xmas and all

[Naomi]

You mean, so you can have windows on your mac? There is a way to do it/program you can use because my husband does it for work stuff but I don't know what it is. I can ask him if you want? but I'm sure Google Help Desk will be quicker (work Christmas party tonight, not sure when he'll be awake tomorrow ).

[chickenbub]

nah, i don't want windows on my iMac. i just want to be able to copy and paste, delete etc onto my external hard drives. they are filled with photos, movies, music etc, files that aren't windows specific, they all work fine on the Mac and I can copy them from the external to the Mac but I can't copy from Mac to external as it says they are in the wrong format (NTFS) and Mac uses something else (FAT maybe??) and says to add to the external I need to reformat but to reformat it wipes the drive clean.

[Naomi]

Oh ok. I'm sorry, I have no idea. I don't use non-mac for anything so I don't know about switching formats.

[Stormy]

If you want to be able to use your external drive in Mac or Windows machines, then you need to give it MS-DOS file formatting. You can use Disk Utility to change the type of formatting if you have any drives without data on them.

Since the one you're talking about already has NTFS file format though, you could always download NTFS for MacOS X which should give you read/write access to your drives without the hassle of reformatting.

[chickenbub]

thanks for the info! off to google NTFS for Mac

[Stormy]

A work mate uses it and she has no dramas between her Apple at home and the work computers which are all Windows. I don't know whether it is free/shareware or whether it's a paid product though.

Hope it works for you because reformatting everything would be a complete PITA.

[chickenbub]

After a bit of research and reading that NTFS for Mac is a bit buggy with Lion I decided to reformat my drives. It has worked out okay actually as it has forced me to tidy up my files. I had a lot of double ups and miscellaneous files that I never got around to filing properly. Also a lot of downloaded files for my old Windows system which are no longer needed. I found an old external in FAT and was able to copy onto that and do a bit of shifting around. Now all drives are reformatted and I am slowly sorting through and putting stuff back on. My Movie and Music externals I used MS-DOS (FAT) as I often do swaps with a friend still using Windows but my main back up external I used OS Extended as it will only ever be used on my Mac. I am NEVER going back to Windows personally. I thought this whole process would be a nightmare as in the past this sort of thing would have taken forever copy and pasting with Windows not responding every 5 minutes and then crashing etc, the Mac is so fast at shifting things around. I actually feel really good getting all these files sorted, in order and named correctly after so long. It's like sweeping the cop webs out of my brain! Thanks for your help, it gave me something to start with when googling