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I have an external (USB) drive that I’m fairly sure is NTFS formatted. I would like to copy the files off of it, reformat it for Mac, and then put the files back on it. I am aware that you can’t convert NTFS to Journaled HFS+ directly.
My Mac hard drive is too small to hold everything on the external drive. I have an older machine with a very large NTFS drive that I can use as temporary storage while I wipe the external hard drive. But then I’m stuck with an empty Mac drive and my data is stuck on the NTFS drive, where I don't want to keep it. Can I write from the NTFS drive to the now-Mac-formatted external?
shadowtalker
Posted 2015-02-10T16:41:39.163
Reputation: 293
Could you share the older machine's large drive over a network? This way the respective operating systems take care of file systems. – user2543253 – 2015-02-10T16:45:49.053
@user2543253 I hadn't thought of that. I could make it work. However I'll leave this question open – shadowtalker – 2015-02-10T16:48:01.120
iPartition can do that, so long as it's not a Logical Volume Group. – Tetsujin – 2015-02-10T17:19:06.733
@Tetsujin if you can elaborate a bit, please do post it as an answer – shadowtalker – 2015-02-10T17:28:02.837
I've tried posting answers about using iPartition before, only to be accused of spam. I'd rather not do it again. – Tetsujin – 2015-02-10T17:29:03.933
@Tetsujin it might be because the iPartition website lists a huge number of features, so just dropping a link is nice (I'd never heard of it before) but maybe not the most helpful thing to do. – shadowtalker – 2015-02-10T17:31:37.527
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@Tetsujin - I haven't seen your specific posts, but if you follow the guidelines in this link, you shouldn't get dinged for software recommendations: http://meta.superuser.com/questions/5329/how-do-i-recommend-software-in-my-answers
– fixer1234 – 2015-02-10T20:54:21.267Another idea maybe ;-) I take it that your old machine has Windows on it? And you don't want to buy a Windows HFS+ driver just for copying files to an external disk once? How about booting that machine from a Linux Live CD (or USB). These usually have some hfsplus packages somewhere. – user2543253 – 2015-02-11T10:45:57.343