Mac help with external HD

[maranellouk]

Morning all.

I have a 200GB external drive which I was forced to buy after my Vaio with XP OS decided bugger up. I copied all the important files over to the external and reinstalled windows.

Now, I have 60GB of music on my G4 powerbook and when I plugge my external in to copy the files over I got the message [b]The item "music" could not be moved because "external HD" cannot be modified".

How can I get the files on the HD?

Cheers,

MARA

[murph7355]

First thing to check are the permissions on the drive.

Right click on its icon, select "Get Info".

About the 5th item dow you should see "Ownership and Permissions".

If the drive was first used on another machine, there's a chance these may nt be set correctly for you.

Clicking on the padlock icon should let you change the settings (after entering your admin password - if you're the only id on the machine, it's just your logon password). You may have to select the "Details" area to make changes.

Select your own id as the owner (with read and write) and you should be OK.

If not, let us know what happens.

[maranellouk]

I can't see a padlock icon or the details section

[murph7355]

Can you see "Ownership & Permissions"? (The drive is plugged into the Mac, not the PC?).

You should see a little triangle next to it. If you click this, it should spin downwards and give more options...

Also, it is running OSX?

[maranellouk]

Oops, sorry for the delay.

Yes, that's where I thought it was. When I extend the "ownership and permissions" all it say is you can only read

Running OSX.

[robbieduncan]

What format is the external drive. OSX can only read from NTFS disks, it't can't write to them (although it can read & write FAT disks which are the best option for Win/Mac sharing).

[maranellouk]

Bugger! That is the problem then.

Ok, solution needed then. How can I get all my music from the Mac to the PC? How do I go about connecting them so I can simply drag and drop the files. Have lan cable and both are wireless.

Cheers for you help so far boys.

[robbieduncan]

G4 PowerBooks have (amongst the many cool features) auto-switching network ports. Simple plug CAT-5 from the network port on the Mac to the PC and the Mac with switch it's insides around to change into crossover mode.

Create a share on the PC in whatever folder you want the music. Setup the IP and Network Mask of the PC (say 192.168.0.2 and 255.255.255.0) for the ethernet interface. Do the same on the mac with a different IP (i.e. 192.168.0.3). Turn on Windows filesharing on the mac.

Connect to the new share using your windows username and password from the Mac (in Finder Connect To Server and put smb://192.168.0.2/ and when asked use the windows username and password). Drag and drop.

Or turn on FTP on the Mac and FTP in from the PC.

[maranellouk]

Thanks for that. Doing it now.

MARA