Formatting External Windows Hard Drive

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legaleye2005 Author

Level 1

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Formatting External Windows Hard Drive

Whenever I connect an external hard drive that I normally use with my Windows PC, my MacBook makes the external hard drive "read-only." How can I change this to read and write?

Also, eventhough its in "read only," can I format the external drive?

THANKS!

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.4.6), Running XP thru BootCamp

Posted on Jun 13, 2006 11:47 AM

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Answer 1

Alan Ivey

Level 3

981 points

Jun 13, 2006 11:52 AM in response to legaleye2005

Your external hard drive that Windows formatted most likely formatted the drive in the NTFS partition type. OS X can only read NTFS, not write to it.

OS X allows you to use the Disk Utility application to format hard drives, including external hard drives, but you cannot format it in NTFS.

OS X can format in FAT32, another format that Windows uses. If you want to ultimately have the external hard drive readable by both Windows and OS X, FAT32 will work.

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Answer 2

legaleye2005 Author

Level 1

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Jun 13, 2006 11:58 AM in response to legaleye2005

So in the Disk Utility... Is "erase" the same as "formatting" in Windows? And which option is for FAT32? Thanks!

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Answer 3

legaleye2005 Author

Level 1

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Jun 15, 2006 7:12 AM in response to legaleye2005

h

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