Why cant i copy file from my macbook to my portable harddrive?

i just bought a new macbook. i'm kinda newbie. i tried copying file from my macbook to portable harddive. it didnt work. can anyone tell me why? by the way, my harddrive is NTFS system. the funny thing is that i can copy file from my harddrive to my macbook.
thanks for the kind soul out there.
mac book Mac OS X (10.4.9)

The easiest way around this is to reformat the external drive to be FAT32 if you want to use it with other PCs, or HFS+ if you only want to use it with Macs. You will lose all the data off the drive when you do this.
You can reformat the drive using Disk Utility.

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I am unable to copy files from my macbook pro to my external hard disk. I tried to copy a movie 800mb in size to my EDD and it shows the loading box and it says zero kb loaded out of 800mb and sometimes it loads a a few kb of the file, then after a while it ejects my hard disk and gives a message saying you should have ejected it properly. and it sometimes gives this message
"The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “....” can’t be read or written.
(Error code -36)".
This happens with a range of files if they are more than a few mb in size, so I am pretty sure its not the file problem. It also occurs sometimes when i try to copy from my EDD to my mac.
I have tried everything. I formatted my EDD to MS-DOS (FAT) format because i need to use it with mac and windows. I tried resetting The SMC and the PRAM and NVRAM. I tried verify and disk repair on disk utility. But the same thing happens over again and it is really frustrating. The problem doesnt happen with my PC.
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Hey guys,
So this is follow up from my debarkle with the EDD. I found out my problem with copying files from Mac to EDD and vice versa was a result of a not so good EDD ( i had an apollo hard drive from imation) that was not very compatible with macs. So i did my research and found out that the best hard drives were Western Digital and Seagate. I bought the newest western digital EDD 1TB and formated it to FAT32 and guess what...no problems so far. The only problem is that FAT32 format doesn't copy files larger than about 4 gigs so i couldnt copy a movie from my brothers computer onto my EDD that was 1080p. You could probably resolve that by partitioning a small part of your hard drive in ExFAT? but yeah, hopefully that helped guys.
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More then likely that external drive is formatted the Windows NTFS format which Mac OS X can Read but it can not Write to that format. So you would need to copy all the data off that drive, to either a Windows PC or to your Mac, thenn use the Mac to format it for the Mac OS. Which would be Mac Extended (Journaled) with a Partition Table of GUID.
If you want to use that drive on both Mac and PC then you would need to format it either FAT32 or exFAT.

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Hi all,
I got this error whenever copy file from my external HD to my macbook (internal HD).
For more detail:
last week, i copy a lot of my folder to external HD then i format my macbook to install new MacOSX Maverick.
But when i copy my file back to my laptop, i got a lot of file with message:
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Some infomation:
My last version of my macbook: MacOS 10.9.3
New version installed on my macbook: MacOS 10.9.3
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The files may be from the old user account and not accessible from the new one. I found this article, though see that it may not be current.:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1402
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http://pondini.org/OSX/Transfer.html
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to frederic1943
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Why cant i copy file from my macbook to my portable harddrive?

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