help! external hard drive issues...

**bigtrubs** · 10-11-2007, 09:38 PM

hey all I just bought a Seagate 500GB external hard drive for my computer that's not letting me put photo files onto it..... is there a certain amount of time it needs to be plugged in before it will let you do anything with it? at the bottom it says 'read only' or when you try to leave files on it it says ' file cannot be modified.'

ps I have a powerbook G4...

**Shaggy** · 10-11-2007, 10:20 PM

Have you formated it yet?

**bigtrubs** · 10-11-2007, 10:44 PM

After some nifty internet sleuthing I discovered that indeed, one needs to format one's hard drive before using....

done and done. thank you.

**Ripzalot** · 10-14-2007, 03:48 AM

i dont know how it works with a mac, but with windows you have the choice of FAT or NTFS formatting. go with NTFS otherwise you are limited to 2GB sized files. can be important in the future when copy large video.

**anotherVTskibum** · 10-18-2007, 06:46 AM

Originally Posted by Ripzalot

i dont know how it works with a mac, but with windows you have the choice of FAT or NTFS formatting. go with NTFS otherwise you are limited to 2GB sized files. can be important in the future when copy large video.

Macs can read NTFS but cannot write to it. HFS+ is a much better choice for the Mac, as it supports full read/write, metadata, and can be set up for journalling. Most likely, the drive came formatted NTFS, which is why he was able to read but unable to write to it.

(If you need to move a drive back and forth between Macs and PCs, FAT32 is the only realistic option and you're screwed on the 2GB file limit.)