Using an external hard drive on a PC then using it on a mac

before i got a mac i was using a PC and i had two (2) external hard drives, and i have all my music and movies in them. and now when i got my mac book pro and plug in the external hard drives its only on read, i cant delete or do anything with them, so now i'm stuck with two hard drives that i cant do anything with them. my Question is how can i change the read part so i can use it on my mac, i cant even format it from a mac only on a PC. can someone please help me

Your external hard drives are formatted with the NTFS file system. OS X can read but not write to that format. There is at least one 3rd party OS X utility that allows writing to an NTFS partition. The better approach IMHO is to copy all of the data from the external disk that has the least amount of data on it to the disk in your MBP. Then delete the partition from that hard disk and create a new one using Disk Utility. Then copy the data from the other external hard disk to the newly formatted hard disk. Then delete the partition on the second hard disk and create a new one using Disk Utility. Finally copy the data from the MBPs hard disk to newly formatted second hard disk.

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I did backup from my Imac to external hard drive, how can I unzip that backup to my mac

I did backup from my Imac to external hard drive, how can I unzip that backup to my mac again

It may be Time Machine, but Time Machine doesn't store backups in .zip folders. Open Finder and select your backup external disk in the Finder sidebar, under "Devices". If you are using Time Machine, you should see a folder called "Backups.backupdb".
If you are using Time Machine and you want to restore a full Time Machine backup, there are different methods depending on the Mac OS X version you are using. Open  > About this Mac, see Version and tell me what version you are using

Does this also serve as an external hard-drive so I can free up space on my macs by transferring songs/pictures?

Does this also serve as an external hard-drive so I can free up space on my macs by transferring songs/pictures?

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15470135#15470135

External hard drive keeps disconnecting and then reconnecting

External hard drive on Time Machine, running via USB keeps disconnecting. Get the pop us that the drive wasn't disconnected properly. This Mac is brand new as is the hard drive. It is a Seagate 1T Free Agent.
After a minute or two it reconnects. I've run Seagate diagnostics and it says the drive is fine.
Any suggestions?

See #A1 in [Time Machine - Troubleshooting|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/Troubleshooting.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum), for a handy widget that will display the backup messages from your logs.
See what that shows; there may be a problem with the backup, which results in TM ejecting the drive. If so, the disconnect may be a symptom, not a cause. If so, see #C2 there. If not, or if you're not sure, copy and post them here.
Also, to rule out other USB problems, disconnect everything but keyboard and mouse; connect the drive directly to your Mac (no hub).
Make sure all connections are snug and secure.
Try other ports, cables, and combinations of the two (a plug that works fine in one port may not make good contact in another one, and throw intermittent errors).

Will my external hard drive be recognized on the Windows side of my Mac?

I have a 2009 white Macbook 13-inch running Leopard and fairly recently used Boot Camp to install Windows 7. Unfortunately I made the Windows side too small and I am now considering using an external hard drive to download all of my files I need for work. I have a few questions...
1) Is this a possible solution to my problem of no space on my Windows hard drive? and
2) I read something about my computer not having HFS read support since I didn't upgrade to Snow Leopard or install the Bootcamp driver upgrades (because it is my understanding they require SL). Will my external hard drive even be recognized by Windows? If not, can I upgrade to SL now and install the Boot Camp drivers before I try to use my external hard drive?
I just really want to do things right this time, since I'm already screwed with the partition size (there is NO WAY I am restoring the partition and reinstalling Windows 7) and I had a lot of hassles with Windows software when I first attempted Boot Camp. Any help would be great! Thank you very much.

Hey there Natasha1608,
It sounds like you need to transfer your library that is on your phone to your computer, and point iTunes to your other iTunes library. For the first, you can transfer your iTunes Store purchases to your library with the following article:
iTunes Store: Transfer purchases from your iOS device or iPod to a computer
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1848
Keep this in mind from the above article:
This feature works only for audio, video, and apps that you purchased from the iTunes Store. Any items that you imported from audio CDs or acquired from other sources won't copy from your device to the iTunes library. However, copies of all PDFs and books from your device's iBooks app will transfer to the computer, regardless of whether they were purchased from the iBooks Store. Learn more about transferring media to your iTunes library.
To point iTunes to another library, use this article:
iTunes: How to open an alternate iTunes Library file or create a new one
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1589
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Sterling

My external hard drive won't upload my iPhoto pics to my mac mavericks

I uploaded all my iphotos onto an external hard drive recently, before I got a cable replaced in my Mac Mavericks (which would have deleted all my files/photos etc.) , but when I went to put all my photos back on to my laptop -it wouldn't let me.
When I plug in the external hard drive, the IPhoto app pops up and nothing else. It then says I need to quit the app and upgrade to the new iPhoto . The only way of doing this is to upgrade to Yosemite which I don't want after reading all the ghastly negative reviews about Yosemite!!
Also no one appears happy with the new "photos" app. One review stating, "it's one step backwards and one step sideways !!!"
It appears that Apple are forcing it's customers to upgrade without options or pushing customers towards the iCloud??.
Any suggestions on how to get my photographs back on my laptop without upgrading to Yosemite or iCloud? Could I install Photoshop Elements and maybe that would resolve the issue?. The laptop and external hard drive only appear to be recognizing the iPhoto app and nothing else. I cannot put them in a file of any sort.

I'm afraid your post isn't clear.
I uploaded all my iphotos onto an external hard drive recently, before I got a cable replaced in my Mac Mavericks(which would have deleted all my files/photos etc.) , but when I went to put all my photos back on to my laptop -it wouldn't let me.
Exactly what did you move and how? And how are you trying to put things back. Where exactly does it breakdown?
When I plug in the external hard drive, the IPhoto app pops up and nothing else. It then says I need to quit the app and upgrade to the new iPhoto
But this will not have happened unless you also upgraded something else - like the OS for instance. Can you give us the exact error message you get?

I want to create for the first time ever an iPhoto library on my Mac Mini from all of my seperate external hard drives over the years. Instead of filling my Mac Mini hard drive space with all of the pics can I import it to a seperate Apple hard drive.

I want to creat for the first time on my Mac Mini an iPhoto library. I have many seperate hard drives with pics I want to import but are concerned I will fill the hard drive with pics alone. Can I install the pics on one larg (1TB) external apple hard drive and use iPhoto functions still with the pics being installed on a seperate drive from the iPhoto OS?

This is our resident iPhoto guru, Terence Devlin's, advice:
You can move your iPhoto Library to an external disk:
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library Folder as an entity from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Once that is done you can import directly into the iPhoto library on the external HD.

How to copy a downloaded movie from mac book pro to my external hard drive?, how to copy a downloaded movie from mac book pro to my external hard drive?

i am running 10.8.2

thanks guys
after formating - will it work the same way it used to or it will start playing funny...
coz my hard drive is like 320 gb ..and it has files from long time which i dont want to loose ..
it may sound stupid but - i always think ..i would ask if i dont know...
cheers

I have all my music on an external hard drive. It is on iTunes on my old Mac mini, which cannot support the new OS, which in turn means I cannot get iTunes match. I have a new Air. What is the best way to get my music where I want/need it?

anybody have any idea how I should get that music from the hard drive to the air without having it docked all the time?

If you have iTunes Match, you don't need to use Home Sharing.
Can I get that to work through Home Sharing?
No. iTunes Match gets your music from the cloud. You upload from one computer and you can then downlaod to the other computer.

Backed up Adobe Creative Suite on external hard drive, how do I get it back onto my Mac?

My Mac is four years old and the hard drive crapped out. I backed up my entire computer before getting a new hard drive, this includes my Adobe Creative Suite which is very important as I am a designer. I need help figuring out how to get this all back onto my Mac so I can get back to work!
Any help will be very much appreciated!

Which Creative suite version you want to install and do you have the Serial Number for that and what is the Operating System ?

I have mac version 10.10.1 yosemite.Using LR3. I exported 7 sub folders from LR to an external hard drive in order to free up space on my mac hd.

encountered two problems:
1. instead of seeing the 7 sub folders in the external drive, all the images are out of order, entirely scrambled. when I open LR3 however, the contents of these folders are greyed out and show 0 images. I can see the question mark next to the image saying it is located elsewhere (i.e. on the external hd)If I plug in the external hd I can open the images and edit in CS5, but as I said it 's like finding a needle in the haystack.
2. no new space shows up on my mac hd even though that was the reason I made the export.
is there a way to fix this? I have a different external hd that backs up LR. Currently it is not plugged in. I am afraid to plug it in because it will take the new LR configuration and I'd lose any option to correct the problem. I also , on the same (different) hd I have Time Machine backup. would that help to fix the problem and bring back the organization I previously had with the 7 subfolders. All that organization is currently lost,i.e. show as greyed out 0 content in LR on my mac hd and shows as scrambled on the external hd.
Can I fix this??

zarowin, you want to move the files. Not export them! See here: Move folders around in Lightroom | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom tutorials. There are two ways to do that. One is to move the folders inside Lightroom to your external HD, the other is to move them in the finder and reconnect the folders afterwards using the tips in the link dj linked to above. Also, you really should upgrade your Lightroom. LR 3 is not fully Yosemite compatible. I think the problems are mostly cosmetic though.
Periodically I get a prompt in lr asking if I want to back up lr and I have been consistent about doing so. At this point however, since those out of order images have be “exported” (am I using the right word??) to the second external hd, into a folder without subfolders, (hence the scrambling effect), if I were to plug in the external hd that is my backup drive (for time machine as well as for lr), won’t it be backing up the mistake I made by not using subfolders ongto the other external drive, thereby compounding the problem?
This warning has nothing to do with Time Machine. It is Lightroom's own backup. Every week or so, it will generate a backup Library that you can revert to in the case of trouble. In fact, you can usually safely delete the very old ones but keep them from the last month or so. Look for them in a folder called "Backups" right next to your main catalog file (probably in your Pictures folder). Be sure to only throw away the oldest backups. If you have never done this and have a large catalog with 10's of thousands of images you probably have easily 100 GB of these backups. Just calculate how much space you are wasting if you started doing this around LR 3, several years of backup catalogs at a frequency of once a week, and a typical catalog size of 1.5 GB (my main catalog is over 2GB).
Lastly, Time Machine backup doesn't overwrite older versions. It keeps versions around of all your catalog files (including the backups!).

Saved my itunes on external hard drive added windows 7 then could not retreive after downloading itunes on new OS

This has got to be a common problem for people upgrading to windows 7

There is no common issue for iTunes on Windows 7.
Granted, based on what has been posted, it could be argued that the only issue is user error or a complete lack of details of the actual issue.
What does "could not retrieve" actually mean? Are there any error messages?
Is the drive actually connected to and accessible from the computer?

How to back up an external hard drive using Time Machine

I have a Macbook. I have iTunes. I have my iTunes folder and contents stored on an external (Lacie) hard drive. I want to be able to back up that external (Lacie) hard drive and my mac using Time Machine to a separate external hard drive. At the moment it is only my mac that is backed up, and not the Lacie. How can I also back up the Lacie so that only the recently added iTunes content is added? Cheers.

You may consider reading the detail in what third-party clone utilities could
do in regard to a backup clone and then use their utility to update that clone.
Once the copy/clone is made (a bootable backup, btw) the same utility can
be used to update the clone. Not certain how it works, and am a bit behind
on making backup bootable clones of my several Macs as it is. I do a whole
backup clone, though a partial or update supposedly is possible.
SuperDuper or CarbonCopy, I don't remember if one of them or both, do this.
Good luck in any event!

A zillion questions about setting up and using external hard drive

Hello. I recently purchased a Cavalry 440GB CACE USB/FW800 7200 RPM 3.5 in Mac Formatted hard drive. My Mac is a Power PC G4 using OS X 10.2.8.
After much back and forth with the Cavalry support desk, I was able to connect it to my Mac. (The USB cable included was not compatible--fortunately, my printer cable was.)
Through Disk Utility I see that my Mac is detecting the hard drive, but there's no icon on my desktop. My questions are as follows:
1. How do I get the icon on my desktop?
2. It was suggested on this board to partition the hard drive. What exactly is partitioning, and is it necessary?
3. If I do partition the hard drive, into how many partitions should I make it?
4. Once the number of partitions is set, can that number be changed? In other words, can it be repartioned without erasing anything?
5. My main purpose for getting the external hard drive is to move all my movies off my Mac. I'm sure I will want to back up other files as well. Should I create one partition for all the movies, and one for photos, one for files, etc.?
6. Once I get the icon on my desktop, is transferring files as simple as dragging the files onto the icon?
7. Once I move files to the hard drive, is it simple to move them back to the Mac if I need to use them again?
OK, that's all for now. I appreciate your patience in dealing with all my questions! Thanks.

Hello,
I'll try my best on the first seven. The remaining zillion minus seven questions will have to wait!
1. If the drive really is Mac-formatted it should just appear. Firstly check that hard disks are set to appear on the desktop. In the Finder go to Finder > Preferences... >General tab and ensure that the box to show hard disks on the desktop is checked. If that doesn't work go to Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities >Disk Utility. Select the drive in the left hand pane and then click on the "Erase" tab. Erase the disk and ensure the format is "Mac OS Extended (with Journalling)".
2. Partitioning is splitting the physically drive into two or more volumes. This will allow you to compartmentalise your data. You will have two or more icons appear on the desktop if you do partition. Although they are on the same physical disk you will be limited on each of the volumes to the size you set at the time of partitioning. If you do partition the drive be sure to use the "Apple Partition Map" not "GUID Partition Map". The latter is for Intel Macs.
3. Whatever you want. My experience is that too many partitions and you loose flexibility in your storage space. Personally on my external drive I have a partition that is exactly the same size as my internal hard drive. I then use that to do a regular clone backup. I then have a second partition for general use. This means I can put files on the external but still guarantee I have enough spare to backup fully.
4. No. Not without third party tools.
5. As I said above, in my opinion the best use is to create a partition for backup and a partition for all other use.
6. Yes absolutely. However if you plan on moving libraries like iTunes or iPhoto then you'll need to show the applications where the libraries are again.
7. Yes.
Some extra pointers:
A. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup your internal drive to the external. Clones are fantastic backups as even if the internal drive bursts into flames you will have an identical copy of all user data and settings: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html (scroll to the very bottom for the version suitable for 10.2.8).
B. Don't use USB to connect the hard drive it's not very fast. Firewire 400 is significantly faster and will allow the iMac to be booted from the external drive in an emergency (USB will not boot a G4 Mac).
Hope that helps a little.
mrtotes

How do I use my Time Machine as an external hard drive to just dump files no longer needed on my computer?

How Do I use my time machine as an external hard drive?

Time Machine is software that allows a Mac to backup to a Time Capsule or other hard drive, so I think you are asking about the Time Capsule here, correct?
http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/
How do you plan to connect the Time Capsule to your network, or is it already connected and configured?
When you have it configured on the network, you can use the Finder to copy/paste or drag/drop files from your Mac to the Time Capsule disk.

Using an external hard drive on a PC then using it on a mac

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