Can not read or write to mac hard drive error

When attempting to transfer music files from an external usb harddrive formatted in windows into Itunes, I can only successfully import a small fraction of the music, and then its stops with a error, that the Mac HD can not read or write files.

It's possible the file names have some 'funky' characters in them that the Mac doesn't like ?
What format is the external drive ?

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I can not save any data to external hard drive from my mac pro. Is there anyone can help me in this regard?( note, when i first plug my ext. drive to mac i chose option to backup later)

I can not save any data to external hard drive from my mac pro. Is there anyone can help me in this regard?( note, when i first plug my ext. drive to mac i chose option to backup later)

The device may be formatted for Windows, as NTFS. The format is readable, but not natively writable on a Mac. To write to the device, you must either reformat it (erasing all the contents) or install third-party software to enable write access to NTFS.

ITunes can not find my music on external hard drive

Had to redo my hard drive; had all music on external hard drive; copied iTunes folder onto external hard drive. Now that my desktop hard drive is clean, and new iTunes downloaded, it can not find my music on the external drive which I have always used. Is there some setting I am missing, do I have to copy music onto CPU?

Hold the SHIFT key while launching iTunes. You will get the option to navigate to the iTunes folder on your external drive. In the iTunes folder point it to the iTunes Library.itl file.

Can I read mail on an external hard drive without importing the account?

HI - I have a large mail account on an external hard drive which i do not want to import on my mac due to hard drive space limitations. Can I review the mail within the Mail app, (or some other app) without importing everything into mail or onto my hard drive? Thanks very much!!

Hi Paint Guy,
*Bootcamp on External Hard Drive?*
Can I install Bootcamp on an external Hard Drive? I don't see why it wouldn't work. Do I need to install the Mac OS on the external Hard Drive first, then Bootcamp?
By Microsofts Design no Windows can be installed and booted from external HDs. BootCamp just follows this.
However, according to this http://tubeshards.wordpress.com/2006/12/05/install-windows-to-a-macintosh-usb-dr ive/ it can be done.
Parallels
Another question. Does Parallels allow you to not have to use the "option" key to boot into Windows? I mean if I use Parallels can I use XP or Vista at the same time as my mac applications?
What, (if any) are the drawbacks to using "Parallels"?
Parallels is an OS X application which don't need a restart of your Mac to run Windows.
Therefor you can run OS X and Parallels Windows side-by-side.
Main drawback is, that Windows runs not native (on the real hardware) but in a virtualized environment.
While this is more than acceptable for 'standard' Office programs, any program that needs direct hardware access (especially games and 3D-programs) either do not run at all or run at noticeable slower speed.
Also you have to realize that the amount of RAM in your Mac is divided between OS X and Parallels Windows.
*What Options are there...*
Is it possible for Apple to allow users to program a key on their keyboard, when pressed will bring up Windows so they don't have to always restart? I need to switch between Windows and mac OS quite often and it's a real pain to always restart. What options do I have?
BootCamp is no option then, since it needs a reboot everytime you want to switch between OS X and Windows.
Parallels (and VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox, BTW) run alongside OSX.
Thanks
You're welcome. Hope it helps.
Have Fun
Stefan
Message was edited by: Fortuny

Can not read or write to disk (error -36)

I have an additional internal SATA 250GB Drive that is partitioned into "Videos" 135GB and "Music" 100GB.
Everything has been working fine until recently. The "Music" drive (where my itunes library is stored) will no longer let me copy a file and gives me an error that reads "The finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "file name" could not be read or written. (error code -36)
I have verified and repaired the disk, but it wont let me repair permissions because it's not the boot drive i guess. "Video" still works fine. "Music" has 1.46GB available.
Let me know if i should move this to Tiger discussion.

I am so glad to hear I am not the only one. About 4 weeks ago, I started getting this issue as well. However, I would get it while making copies of folders onto the same hard drive, any of my 10 external drives etc ... I took my Dual 2.0 (June 2004) and they said my hard drive was bad. They gave me a new drive and logic board, but still had the issue. Went out and bought ALL new cables. Still ahve the issue. I even have the issue on three new external drives! I wish I had an aswer, but I am still confused.
I get the same error code message as well.
Good luck.

How can i read emails saved on a hard drive (from my MS laptop) on my mac?

Hi! I have backed up my outlook mail on a hard drive and now want to view the emails on my mac. Do i have to buy the outlook software to be able to do this? Is there another way to view these emails without having to buy the whole outlook programme? Thanks!

The bookmarks are stored in a file called places.sqlite inside the profile folder. You can copy that file from the old profile folder into the profile folder of the laptop, this will replace the bookmarks in the laptop with those from the desktop.
For details of how to find the profile folder see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
You can recover more than just the bookmarks, for details see https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Recovering+important+data+from+an+old+profile

HELP!: How to read and write to External hard drives? What file system to use?

hey all, this has been really frustrating for me today. i want to be able to write to an external HDD that's formatted in NTFS. today i find out it isn't possible to write to this file system on a Mac and that on FAT32 it is possible. however, FAT32 can't address files larger than 4GB so this hurts me a lot. are there any other file systems that'll allow me to read and write from a Mac? my goal was to use freeNAS to build a NAS with an old tower and connect my external hard drives to it, but if i can't write to them this may not be possible.
thanks guys, i'd appreciate any help!

Read this, you don't need to install any software unless you have no choice.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3044
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Read and write on external hard drive

I have bought my macbook air just yesterday.
I have an iOmega external hard drive with all files from my previous computer (an HP with Windows on it).
Now I would like to open and also edit and save the files on this external hard drive.
However, this does not work. I can open files, but cannot edit them. And I cannot save files to the external hard drive.
I have read a lot of things on the internet about Macfusion, but since I am new to Mac and not much of a computer-person, can someone give me like a step-by-step guide of how to handle this problem?
Your help is very much appreciated!

Drives used for Windows have NTFS partitions and MBR (master boot record) disk format.
Mac uses GUID disk format and HFS+ partitions. Mac, without additional software, cannot write to NTFS partitions, but only read them.
You will need to reformat the harddrive to GUID/HFS+ which would delete all information on it. Or buy some software that allows Mac to write to NTFS like NTFS-3G.

Can't Read A Mounting Dock For Hard Drive (Orico 6619US3)

Hello guys,
My friend just gave me an 1TB 3.5" internal hard drive, Seagate Barracuda model ST1000DM003. So i decided to use it as an external hard drive and buy a docking port for it. It's an Orico 6619US3 docking port. After i plug all the cables and mount my hard drive, my mac read nothing on the USB port. There's no external drive listed on the finder. But the indicator light keep blinking. At first i think it might take a little time, so i decided to leave it for about 1 hour. But after that still there's nothing. I've checked the Disk Utility also, but it shows nothing (except my Macintosh HD & Superdrive).
I'm using Macbook Pro 13" Late 2011 running on OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 and i've already installed Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X. Hope you guys can help me figuring out what is really going on about this problem.
Thanks!

It looks like a warning message to me, but unfortunately I don't know what it's trying to tell you. Maybe another forum user can aid you further. A Google search with some of the keywords in this message does turn up some hits. I did try a delete from an external HD on my machine and did not get such a message.

I can not locate my photos on external hard drive to get them into iphoto

I backed my laptop up on an external hard drive, then installed snow leopard and to get my laptop to run faster I did a fresh install of OS X. Once I got everything done i put my stuff back on laptop and everything looks good except my photos. I have no photos, I am trying to figure out if somehow they never made it to the external hard drive or if I just can't find them on there to get them back on my laptop. I am not that great with computers and I am sure my terminology isn't exact but I am trying my best to figure this out. Thanks for any help

I believe I had leopard and I was having issues getting errors of system not being supported. I contacted Apple and was advised I needed to upgrade to snow leopard. My laptop is from 2009 and I haven't done anything to it till now. The apple rep also stated I should do a fresh install when putting snow leopard on so my laptop would run faster. Apple rep told me to get a external hard drive to put my info on it so the fresh install would reset everything to like it was brand new. I had someone help me with getting everything on the EHD.. doing the right format and such and then once that was done I put in the CD for snow leopard and hit install. Which brings me to now, with everything but my pictures. I have the EHD plugged in... now what? What do I do? I have looked in the EHD in iphoto and it was all standard images *not my pictures but images of a check mark or an arrow again not actual pictures. I don't see a folder pictures and i looked for images and found nothing. I have Applications, Included Free Designs, Library, System, User Guides and Information and Users, those are my options and non of those have a "pictures"
I have iPhoto '09 version 8.1.2 & Mac OS X version 10.6.3

I can not find my photos from external hard drive

I installed seagate external hard drive as my back up and time machine is on. I went to iPhoto and I am not able to see my albums. Did I lost all my pictures? How can I retrieve it and put them back on my iPhoto? The external HD is being used as the main portion and it shows that there is no photos. I am using iPhoto 9.6.1.

No idea what you mean by "main driver". Are you saying that you copied/backed up your internal hard drive to the Seagate and are now using that as your boot up?
Also do not know what you mean by "drag/copy master to iPhoto".
Your photos should be contained in your iPhoto library (your Home folder > Pictures)
To make it clear for us:
are you using your regular internal hard drive to work with?
do you have iPhoto there and is it working with your photos?
did you use Time Machine to back up your system to the Seagate?

Can not install 10.5 on external hard drive.

This is the situation I took my old hard drive from my old desktop that has 10.4.11 installed and put it into an external USB hard drive case. It shows up on the desktop but I can not install 10.5 on it from the disk. Using disk utility it indicates that the drive is bootable. But I can not get to be read as a destination drive.
I want to use this drive in part for parallels desktop and windows NT.

Yeah, that's it. The Partition Map Scheme is set for APM, which is OK for a disk on an Intel machine, unless you want to Install Leopard or upgrade Leopard on it. That's when you need to use GUID.
You can use SuperDuper to create a clone on an APM drive and an Intel machine will boot just fine, you just can't run the updates. I do this for a drive that I've partitioned into two parts, one for my bootable clone, and the other for TM.
I have SuperDuper clone my boot drive to the external drive every week and don't worry about updating the clone. That way, if an upgrade screws up my machine, I can boot from the other drive and reclone the last working system to my boot drive.
I only use TM to track older files, on the fly, and don't want to have to boot from the DVD to restore my machine and get back to work. I do the work I want right away with the clone and then any changes are cloned back to the original boot drive when I have time.

Can not install leopard on a new hard drive

My hard drive on MACBook Pro crashed, swap it with the same SATA 2.5" 160GB hard drive from my PC.
Booted with the leopard DVD holding the option (Alt) key, I get two choices to boot from "Windows" hard drive ==even thou it is not Windows, it originally has Linux Ubuntu installed on it== and the other choice "Mac OS X Install DVD" I select to install the Mac OS, assuming I will be able to access the Disk utility and format the new HD, the DVD start spinning Apple Logo appear for two minutes, then it switch to a blue screen where it hang forever, and the DVD stop spinning.
Any idea how to install leopard on the new HD

Just get a new hard drive and if you have a Intel Mac, OS X 10.6 disk, it's much better than 10.5, faster too.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201

Can not unmount, or erase partioned external hard drive

I replaced a 1 TB external drive partiotioned in 2 with a 3 TB extrnal drive run/store my corbon copy cloner back up and time machine.
The 3 TB drive was successfully partitioned through the disk utility and both back ups are installed and the initial back up is complete.
My question is about the 1 TB drive. I want to completely erase all data from the drive in order to use it for a different use.
Using disk utility one of the partitions deleted without incident when following the same protocol the second partition produced error messages.
Volume erase failed
Volume Erase failed with the error:
Couldn’t unmount disk.
If I try to eject the disk
It says it will not eject becaus e a program may be using it...
The only program that utilized this partition is Carbon Copy Cloner which is not being utilized on the new 3TB drive.
I do not see where there is a option to have more than on disk chosen for this purpose so am unsure why the disk utility is seeing the old partion as still in use.
Any assistance to clear this external drive would be appreciated.

Be sure you've actually Quit CCC. Try ejecting the drive. Wait one minute then reconnect it. Open Disk Utility and try again. Be sure you use the Partition Scheme dropdown menu to set the new partition scheme, choose the Format Type, then click on the Apply button.
If it still doesn't want to unmount, then open Spotlight preferences, click on the Privacy tab, then drag the drive's Desktop icon into the list. Quit preferences and try Disk Utility again.

Time Machine Not Backing Up to an External Hard Drive - Error 11

Hi!
I am unable to backup my MacBook with my external Hard Drive. My Mac is a fairly new machine (September 2009) and I have backed up since upgrading to Snow Leopard previously but I cannot backup at all at the moment.
I have run disk utility and repair completed without any issues, in fact it told me that the drive was running ok. I have also reformatted my drive (mac os extended (journaled) ) and made sure the partition is GUID. The following is the message that appears when the backup fails:
"The backup was not performed because an error occured while copying the files to the backup disk. The problem may be temporary. Try again later to back up. If the problem persists, use disk utility to repair your backup disk."
I have had a look at the log using the Time Machine Widget and the following is what has been generated:
Starting standard backup
Backing up to: /Volumes/MAC/Backups.backupdb
Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Error parsing SystemMigration.log to determine source volume of system migration.
Backup content size: 100.2 GB excluded items size: 85.9 GB for volume Macintosh HD
No pre-backup thinning needed: 17.11 GB requested (including padding), 148.45 GB available
Waiting for index to be ready (101)
Indexing a file failed. Returned 200 for: /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox3tbo.pcf.gz, /Volumes/MAC/Backups.backupdb/Eric O'Mahony’s MacBook/2010-05-02-210743.inProgress/E450C379-52F6-48A3-99D7-F45043074122/Macin tosh HD/usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox3tbo.pcf.gz
Aborting backup because indexing of file failed.
Stopping backup.
Copied 158300 files (12.5 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Copy stage failed with error:11
Backup failed with error: 11
The problems seems to be with indexing a file....a font?? Can anyone help me? It is driving me crazy and I need to backup my files.
Thank you for your help!

ericomahony wrote:
Indexing a file failed. Returned 200 for: /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/crox3tbo.pcf.gz,
The problems seems to be with indexing a file....a font??
Yes, indeed. Start by just excluding it, per the blue box in #C3 in the Time Machine - Troubleshooting *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.
If the backup then runs ok, you'll need to figure out what's wrong with that file.
If you get another error, see the rest of #C3.

Can not read or write to mac hard drive error

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