NTSF and the iMac? (1 Viewer)

I've got a Free Agent Pro external hard drive I'd like to use with my iMac for backups, but it is NTSF and apparently that means I can only have read access on the iMac.

Anyone here have this problem? I've checked out the data on the HD and I either have it on my iMac or I don't want it. How can I get this HD into a file system that the iMac can read and write and, if possible, allow read and write on my Parallels windows side of the iMac? This latter is a "nice to have" but no big deal if it can't be done.

Johnny,

I believe you can do this as long as the Mac recognizes the drive...

1. Connect the drive to your Mac
2. Open Disc Utilities
3. Select the drive on the left panel
4. Click on ERASE tab on the top
5. Format: Mac OS Extended Journal
6. Put in a name for your drive
7. ERASE free space

That should make your drive completely readable on a Mac.

If the Mac doesn't recognize the drive, you could format it in Fat32 format
on your Windows computer. A Mac will recognize Fat32, but I would still
reformat it as explained above.

Ron, that worked. However "Erase Free Space" was greyed out and I had to select "Erase". Since I didn't care about the data, that was no big deal.

Thank you.

Okay...great! Glad that worked.

If this backup is intended to be a bootable clone, you also need to verify that the partition table is set to GUID. Click here for how to check it and change it, if necessary.

Michael_K_Sr said:

If this backup is intended to be a bootable clone, you also need to verify that the partition table is set to GUID. Click here for how to check it and change it, if necessary.

Click to expand...

I was going to use Apple's backup system, I think it's called the Time Machine. Is that a bootable clone?

Time Machine is a data recovery solution like Windows restore point, but isn't a bootable clone. You would need to use Superduper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable image on an external HDD. You can boot a disk image using one of them (I use Superduper) then recover your latest data backup from Time Machine.