I didn't set up the hard drive when i first plugged the hard drive in and now when i plug it in it shows up but i can't put any files from my mac onto the hard drive. i the hard drive set up properly on a different mac and i can exchange between the hard drive and the mac just fine. but on my mac i can not. please help..
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012)
You likely need to enable the option to "ignore ownership" on the drive:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10670
The user account identifiers on the original Mac are essentially foreign to the other Mac (even if the actual names are the same). If permissions are enabled on the external drive then you will either need to tell the Mac to ignore permissions on the drive or you will need to learn to set unix-style permissions and/or Mac ACLs on the external drive and it's directories. Unless you are comfortable with this is just better to enable the "ignore ownership" option in the get info window for tat external drive.
The drive is formatted NTFS. Mac's can read that file system but not write to it without a 3rd party extension. So you can copy from it but not write to it.
The other Mac that can write to this drive must have the additional software installed. If you what to write to this drive you will need to install the software on this Mac also.
However if this drive will only be connected to Macs and not to Window PCs then it would be best to reformat the drive for OS X. This will require you to erase everything on the drive first so if you have files on the drive you want to keep you need to copy them off first.
correct. i can copy from the external drive to my computer but not the other way around.
How is this drive formatted? Open Disk Utility to check. Is this a problem where you can copy from the external drive to your computer, but not vice-versa?
why can't i drag anything onto my external hard drive.
