How to transfer from SD card to USB portable drive using Samsung Chromebook

[Lynne Mass]

I am trying to figure out how to get my friend's Chromebook to allow me to download SD card jpegs and CR photos to an external USB hard drive attached to the Chromebook. The book sees both the SD card and the drive, but dragging a photo onto the drive produces nothing on the drive - I can't even drag a photo onto DOWNLOADS. I have the drive formatted for my macs - tried formatting in Mac OS-journaled, then MS-DOS (fat). Neither worked. Should I reformat it in a universal format and what would that be?

I want to use this combination for an upcoming trip where I expect to take a lot of photos. Putting them on an ipad won't work - too many, too large and I will have no wireless access. Am about to return my friend's Chromebook.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

 

[chipwich]

I will try on my CB asap, but in the meantime, I thought that I would mention that what I hear from my Mac friends is that FAT32 is the most compatible file system when going between x386 and Mac platforms.