I have a Samsung hard drive full of material from my PC. I have just connected to my iMac and it says read only.
How can I change it to read and write??
iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9)
Chances are it is an NTFS formatted volume. OS X does not write to NTFS volumes (or at least not by default).
Google "os x write ntfs" and you will find various ways to write to an NTFS volume.
The hard disk is read/write.
But: since it is formatted in the (Windows) NTFS format, the Apple operating system can only read it and not write. That is all. You can read or copy the files to your mac.
I you want write to that disk, without changing the format (which woud destroy all files), you must install a NTFS driver. There are no brilliant drivers available but a good one is Tuxeira NTFS drivers (standard part of Linux).
In general I advise to avoid such drivers: When you need only a few files to write I would put those on a USB stick, read them in a PC, then with PC copy those to the disk.
Thank you very much.
I remember having this problem before with another hard drive and someone helped me to change it to read-write but I cannot remember how. It was very simple. It worked well and I was able to use it in both my PC and my iMac.
The Samsung hard drive says that it is suitable for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
Ok someone installed the NTFS drivers I suppose. if you want to use it permanently on both Windows and OSX install the Tuxeira drivers.
I did not install anything last time it was very simple... but i cannot remember the process...
The Samsung hard drive says that it is suitable for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
That just means you can electrically plug it in and it will communicate at the hardware level. That does not mean every file system format ever created can be used with every other computer.
OS X prefers HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journaled), and knows how to read/write FAT, FAT32, exFAT, and OS X can read NTFS. But there are a world of other file system formats out there that can live on that Samsung disk (I know, I've maintained and helped develop some of those file systems), but that does not mean Window, or OS X, or Solaris, or Linux, or AIX, or OpenVMS, or Tru64 UNIX, or HP-UX, or FreeBSD, or GNU/Hurd, etc... has drivers to read and write every file system format ever developed.
Again, Google search "OS X write NTFS", and you will find some suggestions.
Another approach is to just access the Windows formatted NTFS disk over the network letting Windows offer the disk as a Share that the Mac connects to.
Thank you for your suggestions. I will try.
change hard disk from read only to read and write
