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General discussion

Help! my usb hard drive no longer alows me to write files

by jaybulletproof Aug 1, 2009 4:44PM PDT

Hi all...

As the subject heading suggests, my maxtor external hd is giving me problems. im a tech pleb so please forgive my ignorance.

im using a macbook3.1 with osx 10.5 an a maxtor 500gb external usb hd.

im pretty sure that when i formatted the hard drive it was formatted for mac, But now it says it in the bottom left corner of disk utitlies that its format is a windows NT file system. if its any use, when i click on the RAID option in disk utility is says the volume format is MacOSX Extended(journaled).

up until 2 weeks ago the hd worked fine, allowing me complete access to backup and remove files. Ive since tried backing up music projects and am no longer allowed to do so. getting a message saying "backup" cannot be modified"

ive checked the forums for similar threads but none seem to have the specific problem of the external HD first working fine on their mac, then no longer allowing access.

in disk utilities i am unable to click on verify permissions, repair permissions or repair disk.

thanks

sidenote: this happened after hooking the hard drive up to macbook pro that was partitioned...i dont know if thats any help.

Discussion is locked

2 Posts
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Mac and Windows disk formatting.
by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Aug 1, 2009 11:47PM PDT

"pretty sure" doesn't really cut it when it comes to formatting a hard drive.
As most of the USB HD's come out of the box with a format system that almost all computers can read, FAT, a large number of Mac & Win users do not format them at all.

As you have discovered, the Mac OS cannot, natively, write to a disk that is formatted, or is believed by the system to be formatted, as NTFS. It can happily read these disks but cannot write.

FAT, on the other hand, does not usually present any problem to any computer. The problem with FAT is that you are likely to wake up one morning and find your data missing or not accessible!

I would suggest that you recover all the data that you can from this drive and reformat it as HFS+(Journaled) and then move the data back onto it.

The indication that it is already HFS+(Journaled), when you click on the RAID option, is irrelevant. It also says untitled Raid Set 1, which it obviously isn't.
I don't think that hooking the drive up to a MacBook Pro that had a partitioned drive is relevant either.

Go ahead and recover, choose the partiton tab in Disk Utility, partition (single or multiple) as HFS+(Journaled), use the options button to set the table as GUID, and then move all the data back

Good Luck

P

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See the dark clouds on the horizon?
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Aug 2, 2009 1:12AM PDT

Moving USB drives around are going to result in data loss.
Reading http://www.multibooters.co.uk/partitions.html we find where XP, Vista differ and where using this can end badly. At the end of the article is more deep reading.

There's a lesson here.
Bob

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