Just bought a new MAC to replace my old PC and my external hard drive is being shown as a read only drive when I plug it in. How can I change it back to a writable drive without losing my data? The PC is dead and can’t be used as a file storage device so I can completely reformat the drive for MAC only use. If you need additional information just ask. Thanks in advance.
change, Computers & Internet
July 19th, 2011 on 5:37 am
Your old Windows drive is almost certainly formatted as NTFS which, as you’ve discovered, OSX can read but not write. You’ll have to copy the files off the old drive to another device for safekeeping, use Disk Utility to reformat the old drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and then copy them back to the old drive.
Obviously, this will be easiest if you copy them to the Mac’s drive, at least temporarily — assuming you have enough space.
PS – You *could* format the old drive as simply Mac OS Extended, but the Journaled option is a much better choice. See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8835.html for an explanation.