Other External products

[bgshap]

I have a Maxtor One Touch ... green brick external hard drive ...

the drive does not let me make any changes, additions, deletions ...

what have I done wrong? 

[ravakk]

If this is a NTFS formatted external connected to a Macintosh, this is going to be an easy answer heh...

Otherwise we need more information.

What format is the Maxtor One Touch?

Recent purchase? Is the drive new and data has never been put on it?

What OS is the target computer trying to access it?

Using USB cable?

Are you trying to drag and drop files/folders? or are you trying to use a Manager Suite? 

[bgshap]

It's a Maxtor One Touch III - USB

the data has been on it for a while

the OS is X 10.5.6

I am trying to drag and drop folders

it is formatted as an NTFS drive

thank you 

[ravakk]

Ah the data must have been put there by a Windows XP or Vista computer.

Your Leopard cannot natively write to a hard drive formatted in NTFS

Cannot write, modify, delete, or move data.

The only exception is on a more complex Mac hosting Samba with scripted d777 f666 permissions.

If this drive will need to be used cross platform, I suggest moving the data from it on your windows PC (or mac emulating windows virtually or with boot camp) and format the drive FAT32.

Beware this would cause a maximum 4 gig file size for any single file so insure that you won't need files that large when planning this. 

[bgshap]

thank you - I did initially populate the drive from my PC and have been using it from my Mac for some time.

Now then, in my infinite wisdom,  I decided to copy all the data to another drive, re-connect to my PC to delete the files, then reattach to the Mac so that I could re-format the drive as Mac OS Journaled. Great sounding plan (I thought) ... only now:

the Mac disk utility will see the drive but not let me erase it ... the operation times out

the PC will no longer recognize the drive, and the system freezes if I connect to the Windows machine

did I kill my drive?

Larry 

[ravakk]

Any particular reason you are wanting Journaled? Just asking....

Extended non journaled with no 9 support would probably be better on a single partition

Yeah NTFS has an active MFT on the drive.

We can either do this with Disk Utility.app or in Unix with fdisk

In your Disk Utility.app, can you go to the PARTITON tab and select Volume Scheme: 1 Partition with Mac OS Extended format and APPLY?

If this doesn't work, we'll lift the hood and partition at command line. 

[bgshap]

well, I went with Journaled because that's the format that I noticed on all the other drives connected to the machine ... no other reason

(by the way, I don't know what an MFT is ...) 

is Disk Utility.app what I get when I go through Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility?

if so, I tried the partition utility, and it didn't work either (that was a couple of days ago) - I just tried connecting the drive to the Mac and it doesn't seem o show up 

... now what?

Larry 

[ravakk]

MFT is NTFS master file table. Its like the File Allocation Table of FAT but it uses unix-like permission schemes.

If the drive does not show up under Disk Utility, power the Mac without the drive, then connect the drive to a different usb port than you used the LAST time it worked correctly. If it does not show up, keep the drive on THAT usb port but power the drive down, wait a minute, then power back up. Do this up to three times (slowly) UNTIL it shows up in Disk Utility and give it plenty of time after powering the drive to run through diagnostics. 

[bgshap]

okay - I don't presume that it matters .. the drive is Firewire and not USB

I'll do it in the morning

thank you for your patience

Larry 

[ravakk]

The external drive is firewire?!

What model is your Mac?

Do you connect with Firewire 400 or 800 (if you have a pro model)

Firewire will be different solution than a usb.

A firewire drive to a mac (if it is not showing up) needs to be connected to the port while unpowered. Leave it connected for two minutes then press and hold the hard drive power button for 60 seconds and release. Wait 40 seconds to see if it appears. If it does not show up on desktop, check the Disk Utility.app to see if it appeared unpartitioned and needs to be initialized.