IMAC G5 and External Hard Drive

I'm new to Macs, and just received my 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cord to
hook up my external hard drive. But, for some reason it will only let
me read from the hard drive, and not save information to it. For
instance, I try to move a music file to the hard drive and I get the
message: "Music" could not be moved because "New Volume" (The Hard
drive) cannot be modified.

When I pull up the info on the drive from my mac, it says under
ownership and permissions "You can only read"
What do I need to do to make it writable?

In article <1103772329.175395.290390.TakeThisOut@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>,
utseay.TakeThisOut@aol.com wrote:

 > I'm new to Macs, and just received my 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cord to
 > hook up my external hard drive. But, for some reason it will only let
 > me read from the hard drive, and not save information to it. For
 > instance, I try to move a music file to the hard drive and I get the
 > message: "Music" could not be moved because "New Volume" (The Hard
 > drive) cannot be modified.
 >
 > When I pull up the info on the drive from my mac, it says under
 > ownership and permissions "You can only read"
 > What do I need to do to make it writable?

This is a matter of setting permissions for the disk. It is a Unix & Mac
OS X issue, to provide security for data and the system.

First, I assume you are the owner of the computer. You should be logged
in via an Administrator account. Your computer has to have at least one
Administrator account. If you are the sole user, presumably you are
using that account. If not you need to log out and log back in to the
Administrator account.

Once in the Administrator account, you should be able to set the
permissions for the attached Firewire disk. To do this, click once on
the disk icon to select it. Then go to File>>Get Info. In the Ownership
and Permissions section, click on the pop-up menu to select read and
Write.

If the choices are grayed out, you will need to set ownership for the
disk. Click on the triangle to show Details in that section. See what
Ownership is set to. It should normally be set to System, although it
could be set to a specific user if you want only that user to have
access to the drive. To make changes, you may need to click on the
little padlock to unlock it. When you change the ownership, that will
require the appropriate password. If someone else used the disk before
you got it, they may have set a different password than your
administrator password; you would need to get that password from them. A
brand new disk should automatically be owned by the System.

For more details, see Mac Help by selecting Help from the menu bar when
the Finder is the top application.

Bill

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