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can't drag and drop from macbook air to external hard drive

hi, just bought a toshiba portable hard drive but can't drag and drop from my new macbook air? when I plug it in, it offers time machine to back up, but I want to do it manually.


MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on May 31, 2020 3:46 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 31, 2020 4:19 PM

You likely need to format it for use on a Mac. Almost all commercial drives are formatted NTFS for Windows. Due to licensing, macOS can only read NTFS drives.


Open Disk Utility.

From the View button, select "Show All Devices"

Select the external drive device (left, outdented named with model/make/size, usually).

Click the Erase button.

Set the Partition Map to GUID

Set the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).


If you hav some need to use it on a Windows machine, just erase the volume as ExFAT. Changing the partition map is not necessary.

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2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 31, 2020 4:19 PM in response to who-goes-there

You likely need to format it for use on a Mac. Almost all commercial drives are formatted NTFS for Windows. Due to licensing, macOS can only read NTFS drives.


Open Disk Utility.

From the View button, select "Show All Devices"

Select the external drive device (left, outdented named with model/make/size, usually).

Click the Erase button.

Set the Partition Map to GUID

Set the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).


If you hav some need to use it on a Windows machine, just erase the volume as ExFAT. Changing the partition map is not necessary.

can't drag and drop from macbook air to external hard drive

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