Sharing Data: Mac OS X <-> Windows

[Emir]

Hello,

I'm new to Macs and I need a little help

I've transferred some files from my Windows OS computer to an external HDD. When I attach the external HDD to a Mac laptop, I only have the permission to READ, that is, I can't transfer data from the Mac to the exHDD and this really needs to be done

The Mac detects that the disk was formatted with a Windows file system.

How can solve my problem? I've look around the net and couldn't find the solution. Tried logging in as the super-user, but it didn't help either.

Thanks in advance,
Emir

[WingedPanther]

What filesystem is the hard drive using?

[Emir]

I believe it's a NTFS file system.

[TkTech]

Windows will usually use NTFS. If you don't change any of the defaults when installing, it will be NTFS.

The NTFS driver that comes with OS X is read-only. The only known, safe NTFS read/write driver is NTFS-3G. On OS X, you need to install MacFuse and then NTFS-3G.

Download and install, restart, and you're done.

[Davide]

The hard-disk's format is NTFS, so Mac can not write on it, you must install NTFS for Mac or some similar program, or format it as FAT32 so it would work on both OS's without problems (but you can't store files bigger then 4Gb on it).

[DarkLordoftheMonkeys]

It depends. Did the operating system specifically state that the files were read-only? You could check the read-write-execute permissions using the command line by typing cd /Volumes, then ls (which shows the names of the external volumes, such as disk drives), then cd whatever the name of the disk is. When you're in the disk type ls -al and see what you get. This page shows you how to read the output:

Linux and UNIX ls command help

I don't exactly know what problem you're having. It's never happened for me before, but maybe that's because I've been getting my Windows files from email (TextEdit can read RTF files made in Word). Maybe you should try that. For reading and editing Windows files on a Unix system, you can use Wine. It's a Windows interface that runs on top of the Unix system, and can run things like Office. I'm not sure if it's available for Macs though.