External HDD's and Macs
 

So for a while now I've been in possession of a hand-me-down Macbook (running on Mac OS 10.5.8) which I've been using as my laptop for a while now. I'm now trying to backup its files into an external HDD since I'll be replacing it with a new laptop soon (one that runs Windows!), however this Mac seems to read said external HDD as read-only, meaning I can't even add files to it. It does the same with yet another external HD I have, which leads me to believe that it's the Mac and not the HDD's.

Note that my overall knowledge of Macs is actually quite small, so any help with how to backup said files would be very much appreciated.

http://guides.macrumors.com/Formatti...xternal_Device
:eyespin:

Ugh, this is why I hate Macs....

Thanks for the reply. Guess it's back to cloud saving for me...

Booting up from a Linux distribution LiveCD (Ubuntu, to name one) should allow you to bypass this problem, but it requires a certain level of tech savviness (in other words, you aren't afraid to use the command console) and familiarity with Linux environment. As a preliminary precaution, you must make sure that the Linux ISO you download is EFI-friendly, otherwise you won't be able to boot from the CD.

Then you need to know about the sudo console command to gain read/write permissions and how to mount drives and partitions. From there, you can copy-paste files from one partition/drive to the other (once you get permissions AND have the drives mounted on the /media folder in the temporary Linux partition, you can put the console aside and use the graphical file explorer to move things about).

There are ways to gain NTFS write capabilities on a Mac, but since you're running 10.5 I don't know if there are any for that OS. Google around and see what you find.