Permissions for external drive

[rfs2005]

I've got a 500 GB WD MyBook USB HDD that I only seem to have "Read" permissions on. How can I go about changing that?

Does the fact that its formatted in NTFS have anything to do with it?


Thanks.

 

[synth17]

Does the fact that its formatted in NTFS have anything to do with it?


Thanks.

Yes, OS X can only read NTFS drives. There are workarounds, but I can't remember. I know it involves Macfuse and or NTFS-3G. My external drive is HFS+ and use MacDrive in XP to read and write to that drive when needed.

 

[TheReef]

You'll have to format it in Mac OS X extended journaled (which won't be readable by Windows), or use a third party program to write to the NTFS drive.

Paragon is one such example

 

[gwerhart0800]

I have successfully used the MacFuse/NTFS-3G stuff to be able to write to an NTFS external USB drive. (I also access my bootcamp partition that way.) It works, but the authors have plenty of warnings about possible corruption. If you don't need the drive to be shared between Mac and PC, then I would reformat to a Mac OS format. If you need to share it, the MacFuse/NTFS-3G thing will work, but you might be advised to have the drive scan checked on a Windows box occasionally. If you have PC systems around, you can just remotely access the drive (shared from Windows with Read/Write permissions) and use it that way. It will be much slower, but because Windows is actually handling the drive access, corruption should not be an issue.

 

[Muncher]

If you're only using OS X, format it to HFS+.
If you're only using Windows, format it to NTFS.
If you're using both, format it to FAT/FAT32.