Can't drag or drop into external hard drive anymore. Worked perfectly before.

I bought a Seagate external hard drive about a year ago. I reformatted it the moment I took it out of the box, plugged it into my laptop, and everything worked perfectly. I dragged and dropped as I liked, and nothing went wrong with it at all. Then I decided to restore my laptop to do a bit of spring cleaning, and suddenly, I can't drag anything INTO the hard drive or open any programs either. It shows up on my desktop and Finder. And I can take things OUT of it, thankfully, but I can't put anything into it, which is extremely frustrating because I use my hard drive as storage and backup.
I did a bit of looking around online, and people are saying that I'll need to reformat it (which I already did), but it'll erase everything in it. Because my hard drive holds almost 300 GB, I'm not too keen on doing that, because it will take AGES, and there's no confirmation that that will actually work. If you have any solutions, please help! And please go step by step as well--I'm absolutely no good with the tech language.

1. verify same on another Mac if possible.
2. Go to disk utility and check verify and repair on the drive and see if it checks out
3. You never should again even consider having a single external copy of you data, at any time for any reason, HD are too cheap to endanger your data like that.
4. Likely dead SATA bridge card, however I cant recall an instance in which communication was one way on an external with a dead SATA bridge card.
verify 1 and 2, and SMC reset your Mac and verify again
SMC reset
Shut down the computer.
Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.
On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.
Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.
Press the power button to turn on the computer.
Note: The LED on the MagSafe power adapter may change states or temporarily turn off when you reset the SMC.
Then I decided to restore my laptop to do a bit of spring cleaning,
Define what you did in your "restore" and spring cleaning.

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If I restart my Mac it notices them
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I can't copy iPhoto to my external hard drive. It will not allow me to drag and drop or copy and paste., I can't copy iPhoto to my external hard drive. It will not allow me to drag and drop or copy and paste.

I can't copy iPhoto to my external hard drive. It will not allow me to drag and drop or copy and paste., I can't copy iPhoto to my external hard drive. It will not allow me to drag and drop or copy and paste.

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http://support.apple.com/kb/TS5168
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downpat wrote:
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Hi Paint Guy,
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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.
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Thanks
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Have Fun
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Message was edited by: Fortuny

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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.
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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"?
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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.
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Also you have to realize that the amount of RAM in your Mac is divided between OS X and Parallels Windows.
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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.
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You're welcome. Hope it helps.
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Message was edited by: Fortuny

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Can't drag or drop into external hard drive anymore. Worked perfectly before.

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