Member Avatar for Firpadirp

I just bought a Powerbook G4 a month ago. I do alot of video editting. I already had a pc with 2 120 gig seagate hdd's. I want to access one of them from an external drive & bought a box w/a 6 pin firewire port on it. I finally got the MAC to pick it up (after trying to move the jumpers on the hdd). But when I went to the disc utilities, it said the drive was unwriteable & therefore I couldn't do anything to it. Has anyone ever had this problem??

Let me know. Thanks, firpadirp

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by raybay

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Quick context: the PowerBook sees the drive in the enclosure but Disk Utility reports it as "unwriteable." As and indicated, this comes down to either the drive's on-disk format or how the Mac is talking to that format. Two practical routes that were not spelled out in the thread follow.

One route: keep the existing format and add write support on the Mac. Open-source NTFS support (NTFS-3G) and commercial drivers (Paragon, Tuxera) provide write access without reformatting. Open-source solutions normally require a FUSE layer and can be slower; commercial drivers install as kernel extensions and give near-native performance. Check driver system requirements carefully—some modern builds target Intel-only macOS and will not install on older PowerPC machines.

Other route: archive the data elsewhere and reformat the entire disk with Disk Utility to match the intended workflow (choose the physical device in Disk Utility, not just the mounted volume). If Disk Utility refuses, the Terminal commands below show the safe sequence to identify and erase a disk (replace disk identifiers and format name as appropriate):

diskutil list
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX
diskutil eraseDisk <format> <Name> /dev/diskX

If problems persist, test the drive outside the enclosure (different adapter or connect internally to a PC), confirm it is not part of a Windows dynamic/RAID set, and avoid changing jumpers for a single-drive external box—those rarely help. Relevant downloads and docs: and vendors Paragon / Tuxera and Apple Disk Utility guidance at Apple Support.

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Member Avatar for yellow

Because the drives are formatted NTFS. Only Windows can write to NTFS. OS X can only read NTFS. You need to reformt that drives as FAT32 if you need to use them on a PC (one drawback, file size is limited to 4GB), or you need to reformat them as HFS+ (no limitations then). However you will have to but MacDrive to get a PC to read the HFS+ drive(s).

Member Avatar for raybay

You will need to reformat the hard drive using the Mac. Have you done that? Or will it not detect it so you can format it?

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