External Hard-drive Problem

Not sure if this is the right forum to post in, so apologies.

I have a Freecom Classic SL 232GB Hard Drive. It's quite good and gives me more than enough room (I've had it for over a year and have only 30GB of information on it). Bought it in Maplin (I think) for around €120.

Here's the problem. It works perfectly fine on my computer, but if I use it on another, it can only read from it, not write to it. Meaning I can't store college work on it from the computer labs.

Is there any way I can change this?

stevenmu

What format is the drive? If you right click on it in My Computer and go to properties it will tell you if it's Fat/Fat32/NTFS etc.

Secondly what OS are your computers in college running, some Unix based OSs will only read from NTFS formatted disks. It's probably possible to enable to write to NTFS, but probably easier to reformat the disk as FAT.

If the PCs in college are using windows, it's possible they've ben locked down to not allow people write to removeable drives (altough not sure why they'd do that)

The hard drive is NFTS. The majority of the computers are Dell and running Windows XP, however some of the newer computers are Vista (but these are few and far between)

Overheal

for only 30gb of data on it, move it off; give the drive a complete wipe/Format (do not use the quick format option just for the sake of things) and see how it goes. Use the Default Cluster Allocation size.

To format right click the drive from My Computer.