cant delete stuff off my external hard drive

afatbollix

hi

my hard drive was normally used with a windows pc and now is being used on my new mac. but i cant delete stuff off the hard drive.. when i put it in the trash it just comes up with error -61

does any one have any ideas?

also is there a delete button on the keyboard?

magooly

ive the same problem

Rhyme

I had this problem when deleting things from my iPod shuffle, right-clicking and deleting didn't actually remove it (despite saying it did).Try holding the Apple (command) key and pressing backspace.

If that doesn't work then you might read into that -61 error.

K.O.Kiki

Is the drive formatted as NTSF (more or less purely Windows territory), as opposed to FAT32 (which plays nicely with all operating systems)?

afatbollix

i wouldent be able to tell you... its prob NTSF as i set up using windows... how do i set it to fat 32

jpfahy

You can go from FAT to NTFS without deleting data but to go the other way I think you have to format the drive. If you google 'ntfs for mac' I think there are some programs that let you read/write to ntfs from osx

decob

osx will only read an NTFS partition, but can read and write to a fat32 partition. MacFuse will apparently let you write to a NTFS drive, never tried it tho.

I've come across the -61 error on a fat drive before, mainly when trying to write to a drive. I take it this is some sort of external drive? is it self powered (usb powered) or does it have it's own power supply?

afatbollix

it is a external hard drive with its own power