[iThink therefore iMac]

Hey all,

So I got my powerbook last week. It turns out that apple sent me the wrong one, so they sent me another one which I just got. I have an external harddrive (usb 2.0) that I was using on my old dell laptop and I wanted to take all of the information on that and transfer it to my powerbook. The drive does not allow me to modify anything on it while it is connected to the powerbook, but when I hook it up to my dell, I can edit/add/change things on the drive. I have tried it on both of my powerbooks. Is there anything I can do to change the settings for the drive so that it works with my mac?

Thanks.

[ghoti]

It's probably formatted with NTFS - which OSX can only read, but not write to. You would have to reformat it as FAT32 and copy the data again to be able to change things on the Mac.

[iThink therefore iMac]

Yup...thats the problem. Thanks for the quick reply!

[Brad]

Or better yet, if you're just going to be using it with your Mac and aren't too concerned with plugging it back into a Windows machine any time soon, reformat it in the native Mac format of HFS+ (aka. "Mac OS Extended").

Windows cannot natively real HFS+ (but it can with third-party software); so, don't do this if you still intend to use it with the Dell.