# Can I format a Hard Drive to NTFS with a Mac?



## johnnymike (Oct 18, 2007)

I did an editing job using Final Cut Pro.  The producer wants an AVI file of my final cut.  It comes in at 31G.  He gave me an external drive formatted in FAT 32 which of course has a file limit of 4G.  He has a PC.  He gave me permission to reformat it into NTFS.  The only MS-DOS format available from Disk Utility is FAT 32.

I've been all over the web and found the utilities that will allow OSX to read an NTFS drive, but none  that will allow me to format the drive to NTFS from my Mac.  Is it possible?


Thanks


----------



## eric2006 (Oct 18, 2007)

I don't think so. NTFS is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft, and all support on non-windows machines has to be reverse-engineered. You'll have to use Bootcamp/Fusion/Parallels to format the drive, or a PC.


----------



## Mikuro (Oct 18, 2007)

It's in relatively early stages of development, but MacFuse will let you write to NTFS volumes. I've never used it myself, and I'm not sure if it will let you reformat volumes as NTFS or simply use volumes already formatted. It's worth a look, though.


----------



## Giaguara (Oct 23, 2007)

MacFuse allows to read and write, but not execute. 
Worth a shot though.

Or use with Fusion (or Parallels) and copy the data from Windows...


----------



## johnnymike (Oct 23, 2007)

Thanks everyone.  I just took the damn drive to my daughters and formatted it on her PC, which is actually my PC that I loaned to her.  Then I downloaded and installed MacFuse, Fink, and ntfs-3g Fuse driver.  Then changed some settings using Terminal so my Mac would see the drive.  Once all this was done <whew> it worked slick as a whistle.  Could then read and write to an NTFS formatted drive.


----------



## tripnixon (Jan 6, 2011)

@johnnymike @theworld

Indeed, with MacFuse/NTFS-3G one can use the Disk Utility to erase and format a drive as NTFS (specifically, under Erase in Disk Utility, Volume Format=Windows NT Filesystem NTFS-3G).

As a word of warning... it can take FOREVER.  The larger the storage capacity, the longer it will take.


----------

