In article <peagreen1952-68423E.01323419042008@news.kpnplanet.nl>, Philip Green <peagreen1952@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have an external USB drive connected to my Mac mini. The Mac is > running under OS X version 10.5.2. > > When I try to delete anything from the external drive I get a pop-up > telling me "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an > unexpected error occurred. (Error code -61)". > > When I try to copy something from the internal drive to the external > drive I get the message "The item <filename> could not be moved because > "External" cannot be modified". > > This is all not very helpful and probably a wrong setting somewhere. If > I switch off the Mac and then connect the external drive to a Windows PC > I have no problems writing, reading and deleting to and from the > external drive. > > Please can someone help me out with this? The Apple site doesn't appear > to have any mention of such a problem. > > Thanks and regards, > Philip.
I have now discovered that NTFS formatted discs are mounted readonly.
I want to format the disc and that is also not exactly a straightforward process. I emptied everything off the disc back on to the windows machine. With Disk Utility I'm supposed to erase the volume even though there's nothing on it and in doing so I must specify the desired format.
In the pane on the left-hand side of Disk Utility's window there is an entry "745.2 GB Freedom" and below that, indented, a second entry "disk1s1".
If I try to erase the top one it fails after a few seconds with the error: File system formatter failed.
If I try to erase the second one "disk1s1" it runs for 24 hours without achieving anything.
