macbook air and external hard drive

phatbear

Chaps,

Having finally taken the plunge and bought a macbook air for my travels etc I find myself getting more and more frustrated with it, guess im just too use to windows.

Anyway a new issue has popped up which may sound the death bell for my ownership.

I have an external hard drive which I use to back up all my pics/docs etc from my win laptop and now when I have plugged it into my mac to drop some pics onto the hard drive its telling me I cant, ie its read only, as its formatted to NTFS, so is there a work around for this as I really want an external hard drive I can use on both systems.

Figment

An external hard drive formatted as ExFAT will work on both.

I have one that I use between my Windows PC and my MacBook Air

phatbear

cheers for that i'll give it a go 1st thing tommorow

jayme1

Take note you cannot reformat the external drive to a new format without loosing all the data on the drive, so if you want to reformat make a backup of that drive on another drive and then format it.

there are ways and applications for OSX to read and write to an NTFS formatted drive which may be a better solution of you can't backup your backup while you reformat the drive. reformatting it to exFAT is the best way going forward but you cannot do it with a full drive.