File transfer from MacBook Pro into external hard drive

Hi,

Can u pls help in following:

I have hd not formatted yet to be used with macbook and it contains many important files, how to do to copy paste between the hd and macbook without deleting my files in hd?

Thank you in advance

can you help me recover the data if i did this process before reading your disclaimer?

i think it was showing some error when i was following your steps to make it writeable.

now this drive is showing me:

"The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer."

initialise..., Ignore and Eject option

can you help me to recover in this stage because i have very important data in it?

can you help me recover the data if i did this process before reading your disclaimer?

i think it was showing some error when i was following your steps to make it writeable.

now this drive is showing me:

"The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer."

initialise..., Ignore and Eject option

can you help me to recover in this stage because i have very important data in it?

Hello Matt,

Im currently transferring all my data from my External Hard Drive to my HP Laptop so that when I Erase it on my Mac I can transfer files from the Mac to the Drive. But after I do this, will I be able to go back to my HP and transfer all the data back to the drive where it originally was?

Hi everyone.it's my first time that I'm replying in Apple.
nowadays I bought a mac but i can't transfer my data from my wd hard or the sp(silicon power)

what I should do I need my data and information both on hard and my mac I can't erase it.

thanks for your attention.

*****WARNING: REFORMATTING A DRIVE WILL ERASE ALL THE FILES ON IT. DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT BACKING UP YOUR DATA*****

It's probably just not Mac-formatted. Some hard drives come pre-formatted as a Windows format ("NTFS"), some come as Mac (HFS+), and some are unformatted.

Connect the drive, open Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder, or search for it in Spotlight). In the DU window, click on your drive on the left side, go to the Erase tab, change Format to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", give it a different name if you'd like, and click Erase. It should then become writeable.

Note that Windows PCs cannot write natively to an HFS drive, so if you need to exchange files between Mac and PC, we need to talk about different options.

Matt

<Edited by Host>

Hi Matt,

I have the same problem and I found your reply very helpful. I just have one question, though: if I click the "erase" button, will this action delete all the files I have already saved on my external hard?

Thanks a lot,

Tamara

Yes. If you reformat/erase the drive all of your files on the drive will be lost.

Clinton

Oh! This was a fast and helpful reply. Thanks a lot!

Hi,

I have an WD external hard drive, and I had a same problem, my mac cad read it but not write. I tried you solusion, but when I hit Erase, an error comes up saying: "Volume Erase failed with the error: Couldn’t modify partition map".

What should I do?

Try the Partition tab - you'll need to make sure you've selected the upper drive name in the left-hand list. Change the "Partition Layout" to "1 Partition", click Options, and choose "GUID". Then click Apply.

Matt

Thanks so much for fast reply Matt. that worked 🙂

but I have one more problem. Although my hard drive capasity is 1T, when I'm trying to write my movie folder to the external hard drive (it's around GB), it says "The item “Movies” can’t be copied because it is too large for the volume's format". 😟

should I change the format again?

actually, I eject and reattach the hard and tried to write again. and it worked.

Thanks again Matt 🙂

Hi,

I need to copy files between MAC and PC via external hard drive. Could you please help me?