cant transfer files to my hard drive

J

jspinx

Registered
Hi everyone, new mac user here and maybe this is an easy fix. I have an external hard drive and I want to transfer some folders onto it. The folders just contain Word and Excel docs. I plugged in my hard drive, the macbook pro recognizes it and I can see the files, however, I cant tranfer any files onto the hardrive.

Thanks for your help
 
How is the drive partitioned/formatted? Click on the Hd and click command + i. Under general there should be a heading named format describing how its formatted.
 
Hi DJackMac
Thanks for helping out. I did as you said and the heading named format states: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
 
jspinx said:
... I plugged in my hard drive, the macbook pro recognizes it and I can see the files, however, I cant tranfer any files onto the hardrive.

Thanks for your help
Click to expand...
You can read the drive, but can't write to it. It sounds like your hard drive is formatted NTFS. If you do not intend to use the drive with a Window computer, then make sure that you back-up all of your data and then reformat the drive as HFS+ Journaled. If you intend to attach your drive to a Windows computer on occasion, then download and install NTFS-3G. Problem solved.
 
thanks! so do i download this then put the file on my hard drive? Not sure i have ever heard of this before
 
You really need to partition and reformat your drive to an apple compatible system.
If yo need the drive to be useable in a MS Windows environment then download and install the aforementioned app.
 
Thanks, but there are too many files and folders on my hard drive to be able to organize and clear the files out. My previous computer was a PC, now Im a mac user, can i still make this hard drive work for mac?
 
Yes, you can use your ex-PC hard drive with your Mac, the solution was given earlier in this thread. Go to Google and search for NTFS-3G and download the free application and install it on your Mac. it will enable your Mac OSX operating system to read and write the files on the old PC formatted external hard drive.

You can keep working with this if you are going to link this external hard drive with its file system (NTFS) to a PC again. If not, it would be worth your while to sort the files on this drive, back them up to your Mac and reformat the external drive to Mac OSX Extended (Journaled) file system. It is faster, more secure, to name a few benefits. Then you can use it as a Time Machine backup, which is a clever and prudent thing to do.

It would serve you well to go on to Google and read up on the differences and pros and cons of the different file systems (NTFS, FAT 32, Mac OSX Extended) to prevent future frustrations.
 
If you need a very technical, but excellent comparison between the different applications that provide full read/write interactivity between a PC NTFS formatted external hard drive and your Mac, you can visit
http://www.codykonior.com/tuxera-ntfs-vs-paragon-ntfs-mac-benchmarks/

It becomes very technical, but the long and short of the tests done on this site is that Paragon's application (about $40) comes out tops with read and write speeds of files of all sizes, and even surpasses Windows 7 speeds to an external drive. If you want a free application, stick to NTFS-3G, but you will not get the speed of Paragon's app, or a native NTFS to NTFS PC link.
 
OK, this paragraph, from the http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ site, explains it:

Many of you have probably noticed that we now have a commercially supported counterpart to NTFS-3G, Tuxera NTFS for Mac.
Tuxera NTFS for Mac builds on the reliable NTFS-3G code base, but has several premium enhancements. The most important one is the new high performance caching layer which makes Tuxera NTFS at least twice as fast as cached NTFS-3G, but in many cases boosts performance even more (see: performance comparison).
The Tuxera NTFS for Mac caching layer also eliminates the need to choose between safety (in the event of a power outage or system crash) and performance, which is a choice you'll have to make in NTFS-3G.

And then you can click on a hyperlink to read more.
 
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