Friedbeef’s Tech

I recently wanted to copy some files from my friend’s Mac to my Windows PC, via an external hard drive, but strangely found that the Mac OSX was saying my hard disk was ‘read only’. After digging around I managed to piece together a workable solution. Also, my situation was that I needed a large amount of information to be moved at one go, so I could not use a flash drive.

Here’s the deal:

The NTFS file system typically used in Windows XP, is not Mac friendly, but the old FAT file system is. So what I did was to convert the file system and it worked fine.

Steps (Warning - will wipe out external hard drive used for file transfer):

1. Backup your data and delete the partition on the external drive
2. Create a new partition on the external hard drive and make sure it is FAT based.
3. Make sure your partition is not above 32GB (Limitations on FAT system)
4. Sit back and enjoy the file transfer from the Mac.

Don’t worry, you can convert your hard disk back to NTFS once you’re done, or just recreate the partition. Just backup your data before you do so. Of course, if you can just fit your files on a flash drive, that’s the easier way to go.

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