Plugged in external hard drive but its read only??

Big-Mac-Please

Big-Mac-Please

Big-Mac-Please

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Helloo :D

I have got myself a external harddrive caddy and today I put my 120gb hard drive from my old pc into it and connected it upto my mac mini via firewire.

The hard drive appears on the desktop as an orange drive and I can see all the files on it but I can't delete any?

How do I change this? There are 50gb of files that I want to keep and about 10gb worth I can remove.

I also want to use the harddrive like normal as if it was a standard part of the mini. Once its not read only will I be able to do this in this current config?

Anyhelp with this would be great as I want to get this working :D

Thanx
BigMac
 
Just had a thought, if I had to format it would it be possible to use recovery software to get the files back? Or is that too risky?

This has messed me right up :(
 
That is far, far, far too risky, however store the data on ** windows system, then format it to FAT 32 and pop them back on, if you dont have the space then ask a friend if you can use some of their space.

Or copy them to the mac and put them back after.
 
hello :)

Well I have connected the hard dive to my windows lappy and now I've started backing up to dvd. I guess its good to have a second back up of the files too.

When I have done this and the drive is empty whats the best way to format it for the mini?

More than likely it will spend its life attached to the mini so would a mac format be best or fat 32 like you said?

Will that work perfectly with the mac?

Cheers for anyhelp and for the reply!

BigMac
 
If it's only going to be used with a Mac, you may as well format it in HFS+.

Fire up Disk Utility (in ~/Applications/Utilities).
Select the drive, the Partition tab, Give the Volume a Name, from the Format drop-down select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)," then click on Options, select GUID Partition Table, OK, then click Partition.

When it's done formatting, it'll mount the drive on your desktop.
 
Will do that :)

If I partition this hard drive when done to say 50gb for videos and then the rest for normal stuff, would it be possible to adjust the partition sizes in the future if I needed too?

Cheers for the help people :D I'm in the middle of putting it all on dvds. I only have 2x dvds and its a slooow process!!
 
If you want to share between windows and osx, then you will need to divide it into 30gb FAT32 partitions.

If OSX Only, then use the HFS filesystem.
 
No I will do it just for mac :) because I plan to hide the HD behind my desk ;)

Any info on the partition? Is it possible to adjust the size or are they fixed unless you reformat?

Thanx again!
 
There are tools that'll let you resize partitions on the fly, but I have no experience of any of them.

Tbh, you're better off with just one partition. Folders are a brilliant way of organizing things ;)
 
I managed to get it all off the hard drive and now I've partitioned it as mac journaled as recomended :)

The hard drive appears as an external item still, is that correct? I thought it would look like the mac hd hard drive?

Thanx for all the help with this!!!!
 
Big-Mac-Please said:
The hard drive appears as an external item still, is that correct? I thought it would look like the mac hd hard drive?
Click to expand...
Yup :) It's still an external drive, after all ;)
 
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