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Ok, so just bought myself a dock so I can wipe some drives and use others as storage. Most of these drives originated from windows Machines and thus are formatted NTFS and not FAT/FAT32

Currently I can dock the drives with little to no issue what so ever. However the one issue I do have is the fact that these drives are mounting as read only. I can take the files off of the drives I think, if I need to.

Now I guess my question would these be read only because they are NTFS formatted drives, or is there another reason? If there is other reason, is there any means I can get around read only attributes. Or am I going to have to format the drives somehow? How would I format them to a useable medium if they are read only?

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Natively, Mac OS X cannot write to NTFS formatted volumes. There are downloads like NTFS-3G which can enable you to read/write to NTFS partitions, but I've had mixed success with them.

If you want to format the drive so you can perform read/write operations and want to boot from it, please follow this link. The format you want drives in is HFS+ (Mac OS X Extended Journaled).

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  • Yea after much digging and searching I found the means to format the drives from within Mac OSX, Its under utilities, the same component you would get from holding down the option key on boot. What I did for the volumes I wanted large data storage 4+ gigs a file I ended up formatting as Max OS X Extended Journaled, then the rest of the drives Im wiping or just using as glorified flash drives I formatted into FAT. Everything seems to be working well. Thank you for your input as well.
    – chris
    Jun 13, 2012 at 19:03

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