Copying files from my MacBook Pro help

[chirurgeon]

I just got an external hard drive since I'm out of room on my internal hard drive. How do I move files from the laptop to the external drive? It won't let me move the files to the external drive. Help please.

Thanks,
Kim

 

[sayhello]

I just got an external hard drive since I'm out of room on my internal hard drive. How do I move files from the laptop to the external drive? It won't let me move the files to the external drive. Help please.

Thanks,
Kim

What kind of error or message is it giving you? Can you see the external drive as a drive on your laptop? How are you trying to do the move?

Sayhello

 

[chirurgeon]

I can see the external hard drive in the Finder for the laptop. When I try to drag and drop a file to the hard drive, I get that little circle with a line through it. The external drive doesn't highlight.

Kim

 

[k5jm]

You must reformat the hard drive. The new External drive is more than likely formatted for NTSF, which mac will not write to. You will need to go to your "Disk Utility" in the "Utilities" folder on your Mac and erase the new disk completely.

 

[OKW Lover]

Mike is right (as usual) about formatting the HD. I've done this myself a few times and there's nothing to it.

Are you replacing the internal HD or just going to move some files off it?

 

[chirurgeon]

Thanks. I will try this when I get home from.work.

Kim

 

[kcb1dizbksfan]

I just got an external hard drive since I'm out of room on my internal hard drive. How do I move files from the laptop to the external drive? It won't let me move the files to the external drive. Help please.

Thanks,
Kim

Going forward, I would recommend purchasing an external hard that uses a Mac compatible HFS PLUS file format ... Life is complicated enough w/o having to do any more work than you have to ... Unless of course your getting paid to do it!

DR NYKCB (Ken)

 

[chirurgeon]

It worked. Thank you all for your encouragement. Now I will have room for my photos and knitting patterns.

Kim