why the mac can’t write to your external hard drive

I’ve seen this problem a couple of times now – someone trying to write onto an external hard drive with a mac. The mac can read files off that drive, but not write to it. PCs can read and write to the drive with no issues. It doesn’t matter which user account you try, it still doesn’t work on the mac. It makes no sense!

You can waste many many hours trying to fix permissions, which seem like a likely culprit. But first you should check the formatting of the external drive. Particularly if the drive was initally formatted for use with a PC.

If the external hard drive is NTFS, you’re out of luck. Macs can read files off an NTFS drive, but they cannot write to an NTFS drive. You will have to reformat your external hard drive, or create a FAT32 partition for the mac and just write to that partition.

This does indeed suck.

Actually there’s on last hope before you embark on reformatting. Some people report success using NTFS-3G Stable Read/Write Driver (also see the wikipedia entry: NTFS-3G | wikipedia), which should let you read NTFS drives using an OSX system. However I can’t personally comment on this as I’d already reformatted my drive before I heard about it.

So give the NTFS drivers a go. But if that doesn’t work, you’re stuck reformatting to something like FAT32. Depending on the system you use to reformat the drive, you might need to use a third party hard drive formatting tool like Partition Magic to get around FAT32 size limits. Have fun doing a round trip to your system drive with your backups…

Of course there are plenty of other reasons why your mac might not write to an external hard drive, but you should eliminate this one first.

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