No you need to format it as FAT32 instead of NTFS. Which means you need to copy ALL (ALL, that means everything on the whole drive) somewhere else safe. Then you need to google:

format fat32 external on a mac

And read some of those posts. It's under Disk Utility / Erase / select FAT32 on your mac.

But I warn you ERASE does just that, erases everything. Back it up!! Don't say I didn't warn you...

No, you dont need a new external, if the drive was originally formatted on the pc it is most likely NTFS, Mac cannot write to an NTFS drive so therefore it cannot save loops, cue points, etc..... you must save everything on the external to another drive as a backup, format it as FAT32 or OSX journaled if you are only using the mac now

lol,,, douggy beat me

thanks!!

Using FAT32 is a terrible idea.

Enough said.

so just get a new drive then?

As long as the drive is physically OK, you should be fine with reformatting it. If you're unsure of the drive's condition, you might want to check the option to have Disk Utility "Zero Out Data". Normally that's used as a security measure, but it can also help detect if the drive has any bad sectors.

If you're just going to be using it with a Mac, the formatting you want to use is the "Mac OS Extended (Journalled)". If you need to share data between Mac and Windows, I suggest using simple file-sharing over a network...really not hard to do (plenty of info online that will help you do that), no major expenses involved (some CAT6 cables and a decent gigabit-capable network switch, total $50 or less), and very speedy if both computers use gigabit ethernet. (I wouldn't recommend file sharing for music/videos over wireless, since it would be way slower).

The reason some people use FAT32 formatting is that drives formatted that way can be written/read on both Mac and Windows computers. But FAT32 formatting is much less "safe" than either NTFS or Mac OS Extended in terms of data integrity, especially at times when something unexpected happens (like an external drive getting accidentally disconnected, or losing power).

I use FAT32 for USB thumbdrives that I use as temporary "sneakernet", but would never use it or recommend it for situations where long-term data integrity was a major concern.

The reason I bother to comment on this subject with some regularity is that out of all the times in the recent past I've seen people have problems involving data corruption/data loss where there wasn't any evidence of an actual hardware problem with the drive, FAT32 was *always* the formatting involved.

From forums.macrumors.com

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Grannyville7989
But OS X cannot write to NTFS. Additional software would be required for it to do so.
Big effing deal. NTFS-3G is free. It allows the Mac user to read, write, format, and partition NTFS drives. Because virtually every Windows machine supports NTFS and the Mac supports NTFS with the installation of free software, there is practically no reason to format a volume as FAT32.

To be clear: MacOS X can read NTFS out-of-the-box. In MacOS X 10.6, write access to NTFS is available, but is disabled. NTFS write-access can be enabled from the Terminal command line. NTFS-3G works well with MacOS X 10.6, but it is required only for older versions of MacOS X.
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