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How Do I Make My External Hard Drive Work With A Mac?

April 26, 2017add-ons Computers external hard drive hardware internet Mac

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How Do I Make My External Hard Drive Work With A Mac?

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10 Posted

All Windows formatted hard drives “work” with Macs as far as mounting and allowing you to see the files. If that isn’t happening, there is some fault with the format of the drive. Often a borderline faulty format will work with Windows, but not with OS X. Writing (saving, moving, renaming) files to an NTFS format drive is not enabled by default in OS X. The FAT-32 format is fully useful for all recent versions of Windows and OS X. Unfortunately, it does not allow use of 4GB or larger files. To use NTFS drive volume with OS 10.2 to 10.6.x, install “NTFS for Mac” or a combination of “MacFuse” and “NTFS-3G”. To use NTFS drive volume with OS 10.6, use either of these same options or use a utility called “NTFSMounter”. This last option is not automatic. You have to open NTFSMounter each time you start your computer or connect an NTFS drive and choose the drive (even if it is the only NTFS drive connected) in the NTFSMounter window.