I recently bought a flashdrive of a 100 GB capacity, but it turns to a Read Only disk on Apple Mac.?

Question

Whereas on my Windows XP at home, I can add and remove things from the flash drive. If I try the same on Mac, a sign states that it's a Read Only disk with no other information. Why does this happen? Is there any way around this? Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi,

If the file system is NTFS, then it woud be read only in OS-X.
You would have to format it to FAT32 in order to be able to have write access on it.


Cheers,
Manish

Answer 2

First of all, there is no flashdrive with a capacity of 100GB. I assume you mean an external hard drive. The issue is, if we are indeed talking about an external hard drive is, if you plugged it into XP first it may have formatted it as a NTFS drive. Mac OSX can read but not write to NTFS formatted volumes. There isn't much you can do about this, which computer do you want it to work on? Dump all the stuff from the drive back to your Windows XP machine and format it as HFS+ from you Mac if that is what you want to use it on. BUT, Windows XP cannot read or write to HFS+ formatted volumes however there are third party applications that report to do this but I cannot vouch for any of them. Basically you're going to have to use this on one computer. Now, you can put files on it from XP and transport them to your Mac but you won't be able to save anything from the Mac to the drive.

Yeah, you could format the drive back to FAT32 but again, you'll have to pull all the data off of it and reformat it. I wouldn't unless you NEED to and you may very well, if you need to use this drive fully on both a Mac and Windows XP.

Note, once a drive is formatted as NTFS, it's difficult to go back to FAT32, in fact once it is formatted as NTFS, I think you can only reformat it as NTFS, the FAT32 option will not be available, at least, it is not available for me.

Answer 3

change it to FAT32
THEN IT WILL B OK