External HDD not recognised

[DezUk]

I'm kinda new to the world os Macs and OSX so be kind

I tried plugging my external hard drive into my MacBook but it isnt recognised in OSX. Its formatted NTFS and is just full of music.

I assume it needs to be Mac formatted for it to work and if so is there a way to convert it without loosing the data on it ?

 

[MagSafe]

If I remember correctly NTFS drives can be read by OS X but not written too, i'm guessing the problem is something to do with the NTFS format anyway.

Just transfer the contents onto another hard drive for a while and reformat the drive to either FAT32 or Mac OS X Journaled (Extended) via Disk Utility (Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility)

 

[deano]

i had the same problem with an external 250gb firewire drive, reformatted it to fat32 as i need to use the drive between windows and my mac.

your need to format it on the mac, using the disk utility program as windows didn't want to format a drive that size as fat 32.