Why doesn't my Hitachi 1TB USB drive work on my MacBook Pro?

2

I have been using a 1TB Hitachi USB drive on Windows 7 for a couple months.

I want to transfer some files from my MacBook Pro to the hard drive.

I plug it in, I can see the directories, but I can't create files, directories or copy files to the drive.

When I right click and look at "get info", it says:

Sharing & Permissions: you can only read

How can I get my MacBook Pro to work with my Hitachi USB drive so I can copy files to it?

Edward Tanguay

Posted 2010-11-11T21:47:40.433

Reputation: 11 955

Answers

6

Mac can't write to NTFS file systems. You need to have a FAT or possibly FAT32 file system for it to be cross OS for read and write. (between Mac and PC)

EDIT: I did more research because I had a feeling there might be another way. There is a driver that will allow you to use NTFS filesystems on a Mac. Here is the link to the information that I found. http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html. Here is a link to the drivers that you can download to get the functionality you need. http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

-Good Luck

David

Posted 2010-11-11T21:47:40.433

Reputation: 6 975

I've got another USB drive, if I format it as FAT from Windows, then I will be able to read/write to it from both windows and mac? – Edward Tanguay – 2010-11-11T21:53:45.963

Yup! I have had to deal with this at the Datacenter I work at. Marketing people wanted Macs. But they also needed to transfer files from there old systems. I was confused for a little bit. – David – 2010-11-11T21:55:58.040

when I try to format it, the only choice I have is "NTFS" and "exFAT", is exFAT what I want, it seems to be FAT64: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exfat, but it also says "Mac OS X Snow Leopard added exFAT support in version 10.6.5 on November 10, 2010." looks like I'm just in time, oh, but I only have 10.6.4, is there a way to do this before updating my MAC OS?

– Edward Tanguay – 2010-11-11T22:02:07.970

What are you formatting it with? I don't think exFAT will work on Mac. – David – 2010-11-11T22:04:02.677

O wait. The last post in the following link states that Mac has added drivers to support exFAT. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=686923 I would try it. If it doesn't work, you can always reformat it. I will try to check this later, but I need to commute home from work now. (1 hour)

– David – 2010-11-11T22:05:24.737

I'm formatting with Windows 7. – Edward Tanguay – 2010-11-11T22:05:48.637

Did you try to format as exFAT yesterday? If so, how did it work? – David – 2010-11-12T12:48:32.983

I added more to my answer. – David – 2010-11-12T15:37:37.243

What was the outcome? I hope everything worked out... – David – 2010-11-24T15:14:36.740

1

David is correct. It'll be formatted as NTFS. MacOSX has built in support for reading NTFS volumes but it can't write them.

In addition. If you want to write to the drive and can't reformat it as FAT32 then you can install MacFuse.

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

By the way, write performance is terrible for a number of reasons. There are alternative ntfs-3g drivers available. See: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Matt H

Posted 2010-11-11T21:47:40.433

Reputation: 3 823

Asked: 2010-11-11T21:47:40.433

Viewed: 4 405 times

Active: 2010-11-12T15:37:17.133