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I have recently connected a 2nd internal hard drive to my mac; this has alot of my work on it. When i look in disk utility it says it isnt mounted. How do i reformat the drive to Journaled HFS+ and keep the data i have on it?

thank you, slex.

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You don't. Formatting involves a complete change to the low-level data structures that tell the file system where one file begins and another ends. NTFS and HFS+ have completely different ways of doing this - you can't switch between the two without losing everything. What you will need to do is copy the data off (perhaps by using NTFS-3G, though I could have sworn Mac OS X had read-only NTFS drivers - can you use Disk Utility's mount button?), format the hard drive, then copy the data back on.

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i suppose to copy the read only files i will ned to mount the drive, how would i do that? – slex Dec 21 '10 at 0:39
Is the "mount" button not active in Disk Utility when you select the drive? If it's not, it could imply that there's something wrong with the drive. Have you tried Disk Utility's verify disk option? Are all the cables seated properly? Also, from my limited experience with additional I seem to remember that jumper settings can sometimes make them not work, but I can't remember what the correct settings are for the second drive. Google might, though. – Scott Dec 21 '10 at 9:25
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