I can't manually drag files to/from my external hard drive to my macbook air!

My laptop is running on 10.9.4 (freshly installed, quite literally two days ago).
I have all permissions to read and write on my hard drive, and it is formatted in MS-DOS (FAT32). It worked yesterday when I moved music on the laptop but now when I try to move other files (even within the hard drive itself) I can't. Help please! The only way I can move anything to and from the hard drive is to copy-paste is but I cannot manually drag anything.

Can you drag files to or from any folder?

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Double click on them.
You could create Aliases and store them in a convenient place.
Drag the folder with the apps to your Dock and launch them from the folder on your Dock.
Make sure Spotlight indexes your external disk, then use Command-Space -> name of app -> return

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If you're on Leopard or Snow Leopard, or Lion with iPhoto '08 or earlier, see the gray box at the end of Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #15.
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If you used the Finder to move the files, iMovie will have lost track of them. iMovie holds the locations of the Event files, and Project files contain references to those locations. If you move the files, iMovie has no way of knowing where they are.
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Can i download and run itunes from an external hard drive

can i download and run itunes from an external hard drive?

The iTunes application should be on the boot drive but you can keep the iTunes library on an external.
hold Shift when launching iTune sand select Create library and select the external.
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Can I view photos and movies from my external hard drive? I used Time Machine and a WD Passport for backup. Since my drive on my MacBook Pro is filling up I was planning to delete some of the movies and photos.

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Hello, eco1.
Thank you for visiting Apple Support Communities.
This sounds like you are wanting to move your iTunes media folder to an external drive and have iTunes this folder from this location. If this is the case then I would recommend taking a look at the article below.
iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449
Cheers,
Jason H.

Is there a way to access my iTunes Library, which is stored on a (PC) External Hard Drive, on a MacBook Air (through an Apricorn Universal Hard Drive Adapter), without transferring the music files off of the external hard drive?

Is there a way to access my iTunes Library, which is stored on a (PC) External Hard Drive, on a MacBook Air (through an Apricorn Universal Hard Drive Adapter), without transferring the music files off of the external hard drive?
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Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks so much!

You will have to engage a split library which means you will have to start answering questions on this forum because you will need to learn a lot about how iTunes works in order not that have a big mess at the end of it all. It also won't be easy when the time comes to relocate it all to different drives.
You can go to advanced preferences and turn off organize media and copy to items to media folder when adding items to library. Next read about how to selectively consolidate items to the external drive.
Sept. 2010, Consolidate selected content - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2589812 and April 2014, https://discussions.apple.com/message/25414357
"...selected the new tracks directly in iTunes, Control-clicked on the selection, and saw that now you can consolidate selected items." - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090919000326840
Remember that when you start iTunes without the external drive turned on iTunes will present you with a bunch of broken links. If you have automatic downloads enabled with iCloud you may have to turn that off to prevent iTunes from repopulating your drive trying to deal with those "missing" tracks.
If you add tracks in bunches to iTunes and want them to go to different media folders you will need to either add them by holding down the option key while dragging if the desired media folder is not the one set in preferences, or by changing the media folder in preferences. Changing media folder preferences only applies to new files added, not old ones.
Okay, I am going to stop typing because you might just reply to me, "Oh, okay, forget it," and I don't need the exercise.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391

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Hello B3NN13,
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Sincerely,
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Hello B3NN13,
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Drag the libraries to it, launch each application with the Option key held down, and point them there. The iPhoto library needs to be stored on a drive, partition, or disk image formatted as Mac OS Extended.
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angelafromlanchester wrote:
I moved my music to an external hard drive to free up space on my old laptop. Since I moved to a new laptop, iTunes never seems to find the music.
Has the new laptop given the external drive a different drive letter?
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tt2

I can't manually drag files to/from my external hard drive to my macbook air!

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