Expert: Chris Morrison Date: 7/19/2008 Subject: External Hard Drive
Question I have an external hard drive that I previously used my IBM laptop. I have recently purchased a MacBook and I have tried to backup my files onto my external hard drive and it says that it is read only and will not let me modify it. It allows me to take files off of the hard drive but not the other way around. How do I fix this problem? It is a ROCK mobile disk external hard drive. Thank you.
Answer most likely the drive was formatted for the old operating system. The MAC can of course read this but can't write to the format. So all you need to do is copy everything off the drive to your macbook, then reformat the drive for the macbook.
Be aware you may want to format the drive as FAT if the macbook will allow it, this will enable the drive to still be seen on an IBM based computer also.
