Your drive must be formatted as NTFS. On Macintosh by default NTFS is readonly.
You should save the contents of the drive somewhere and then reformat it as fat32. Then you can copy them back and it'll be read-writeable by both windows and macos. Note you may see some.data folders appear on the windows side, these are metadata folders, and aren't harmful.
What you really need is to an external disk that you copy the files to for storage Then another disk for backup Depending on how your photos and video are stored and managed on your Mac it may be possible for the storage disk drive to be formatted so that it can be accessed by both the Mac and PC. The Remote Disc feature of your Mac lets you use files stored on a CD or DVD hosted from another computer. Sharing discs If your Mac doesn't have a built-in optical drive and you need to use a CD or DVD, you can connect an external drive like the Apple USB SuperDrive. E-reader for mac.
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Alternatively you could download the ntfs-3g filesystem, this is a userspace filesystem based on fuse. If that frightens you in any way, i'd resort to the first idea above. Community edition or Cheers Mike. If you're running the latest version of OS X Snow Leopard, you should format your external drive using the file system. It is fully compatible with both Windows and OS X and gets past the many limitations of FAT32 (the most annoying of which is the 4 GB file size limit). As mentioned, your drive is likely formatted as NTFS right now. Tuxera and Paragon have great NTFS products which are not free, and in my experience ntfs-3g has been quite slow.
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On the other hand, will allow you to access an HFS+ partition on Windows. But exFAT is already built-in to both Windows and OS X and gets past the limitations of FAT32 while providing speedy native access to the data. Along with the other good answers, I'd like to point out that if you want to have the option to boot the Mac from the external hard drive — which I highly recommend for the sake of future system troubleshooting — then you must use a GUID Partition Table (GPT) on the drive, and have at least one HFS+ partition big enough for Mac OS X (I usually use 20GB for bootable Mac OS X partitions, as it's big enough for a full install of Mac OS X plus some files, but you might be able to get away with smaller than that). Intel-based Macs such as your MacBook Pro cannot boot from drives that use Master Boot Record (MBR) or Apple Partition Map for mapping out which partition is where, and they cannot boot from any volume formats other than HFS+.
The external harddisk you used on the mac is most likely formatted with a OS/X specific filesystem which windows does not understand. To use it with windows you either: • Learn windows how to read HFS+ • Or use a windows program that understands HFS plus.
• Convert the filesystem. For 1) you want to look for a windows driver for the HFS+.
Googling for 'HFS on win 7' yields several results. Including a driver and a. Option 2) is more work because you will need to temporarily store the files somewhere while you reformat the drive with a format which windows understands (most likely with NTFS). It is also the best choice if you want to use the external drive with several different windows computers, since you would have to install the previous programs on each of those of you go for option 1 or 2.
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Today I bought a 3TB My Book external hard drive. The only reason I need this is to move my 2,000+ pictures and 100+ videos off my Mac and keep them safe. These pictures and videos are filling up my memory and I can't seem to do much else with the whole 10GB I have free. Setting up and backing up My Book with Time Machine seemed to be a breeze and I can see all of the items on it that I need to. Honestly, I didn't want to back up my whole computer, I didn't need to. All I need off the Mac is the pictures and videos and I must be able to move them safely to another computer, if I want to.