External hard drive

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Level 1

8 points

External hard drive

I've just bought a Mac mini to replace a windows laptop that has come to the end of its days. I have an external hard drive that I have back ups of my digital photos on, along with files I want to take across to my Mac. Whilst the drive is recognised and I can view or copy the files from it to my Mac I cannot write to it or delete files stored on it. It is I believe a 2tb drive, which is probably less than a quarter full, so I want to make use of it. From looking on this website and other internet sites I guess it's currently formatted just for PC, so will need reformatting to enable write as well as read only access from my Mac. If I'm understanding it correctly I have two options to make it useable as a backup and not lose the data on it.

option one

copy all the files on it onto my macs internal hard drive. Format my external to suit my Mac. Copy/move files back onto external.

option two

copy all the files onto my macs internal. Format external to suit Mac. Leave files on internal. Use external as a time machine, which, if I'm understanding it correctlay, will give the advantage of backing up the whole system and not just my files.

My question is (a) is my understanding correct and (b) which is the best option?

Mac mini

Posted on Aug 18, 2015 3:39 PM

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Answer 1

Niel

Level 10

727,175 points

Aug 18, 2015 3:44 PM in response to jam5971

A. Yes.

B. Option two. If your internal drive doesn't have enough space, get a second external drive, reformat it the same way, open the Time Machine pane of System Preferences, press the Options button, and remove the second external from the exclusion list.

(131953)

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Aug 18, 2015 3:50 PM in response to jam5971

That drive was most likely formatted NTFS on your PC, and OS X cannot write to an NTFS formatted drive. After you copy all your files to your Mac you can re-partition and re-format of the Mac. How you choose to use it then is entirely your choice. My personal choice is to use it as a permanent backup drive.

Drive Partition and Format

1. Open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder.

2. After Disk Utility loads select the external hard drive's volume (this is the in-dented entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the Disk Utility main window. Set the Format type: to MSDOS (FAT32.) Click on the Erase button.

3. When the above is completed select the external hard drive (this is the out-dented entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the Disk Utility main window Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the Disk Utility main window.

5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.

6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

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Answer 3

Aug 19, 2015 2:55 AM in response to jam5971

FWIW, there is also a third option.

You could purchase NTFS 12 for Mac (https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/)

which adds full NTFS support to OS X. It costs $19.95.

There is also a free method documented here http://technofaq.org/posts/2015/04/enable-ntfs-write-support-on-mac-osx-yosemite -and-mavericks-without-using-a-third-party-driver/ but requires that you be comfortable using command line interface. It also documents how to undo things 🙂.

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