Problems with Macbook Pro and external hard drive

Ravelleman

My old HP laptop recently had a motherboard failure, leaving me without a laptop for about a month. I was able to remove the hard drive and back up my files and my music on my father's Macbook Pro.

Now I've replaced the HP laptop with a new Dell and I want to move my files over from the Macbook Pro to the Dell. A friend of mine gave me his external hard drive to make the transfer but when I connect it to the Macbook Pro it comes up as a read only device and won't let me add new files to it. When I connect it to the Dell, it becomes read and write again and allows me to move files.

Does anyone know how I can fix this and get files from the Macbook Pro on to the external hard drive? I really need to sort this out quickly as I'm moving to Spain on Monday and won't have a chance to get the files for several months after that!

ZENER

I'm guessing that the drive your mate gave you is formatted in NTFS. By default MacOS can only read these file systems. You have 2 options.

1. TAKING THIS OPTION WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON THE DRIVE !!
Format the drive in Disk Utility on the Mac and set it as a FAT filesystem. Readable by Mac and Windows. This is ok if your mate doesn't already have files on the drive he may wish to keep.

or

2. Install MacFuse and allow your Mac to both read and write NTFS drives. This is the preferred option if there are files on the drive that must be kept.

Hope this helps.

Ken

Ravelleman

Thanks! I installed MacFuse and it's all working perfectly now.