External NTFS drive coming up empty

I have a hard drive enclosure I just got, and the drive in it is formatted NTFS. I know OS X is supposed to be able to read (but not write) NTFS-formatted drives, that's not the issue.
OS X recognizes the drive, but the only thing that shows up is a folder called Recycler (where Windows stores files in the recycle bin IIRC). Disk Utility recognizes the exact number of files and the amount of space they take up, but that's it. They're not viewable (and obviously not copiable).
Most of the answers I've seen to this problem is simply "reformat the drive" ... that's a problem. There's about 80GB of data on this drive, and my Mac doesn't have enough free space (not really sure I could clear it up, either). Plus the PC this drive was originally on is dead (motherboard died), so I can't use it to back this stuff up to reformat.
Any other ideas?

Hi,
Are you saying that you can work on your files in FCE4, restart your computer, and FCE can't find the files you were just working on? How do you eventually find them and get FCE to edit them?
Are these files now always kept on the external drive? Not on your internal HD?
What follows is just a conjecture . . . I'm sure I am missing some of the details of your situation, but maybe another perspective will help.
I have found that during the prolonged process of downloading large video clips from my Canon HG10 camcorder to my MacBook, I often disconnect the camera while I work with the clips on the computer.
Sometimes, I don't need to edit the clips, I just want to keep them for future playback. So, those clips are offloaded to an external hard disk by dragging the clip to the HD that is attached either by USB or Firewire.
Subsequently, when I eventually re-connect the camcorder, FCE4 informs me that those video clips I have deleted from a particular Project folder are "offline".
Well, of course, and that is fine. I don't need FCE to know about those files. Those files are on a different HD and FCE has lost track of their location. They are not on the internal disk in a Project folder, and they are not on the camcorder's HD, having been deleted.
Putting this all together, I suspect that when the Apple guys restored your files, they probably stripped whatever content they could detect onto a separate disk, performed some software majic, and then moved the recovered content back to the previously corrupted HD, and in the process created a new file structure.
FCE can't find items that it used to know about. The LaCie HD is working again, but you need to synch that info with FCE somehow. Basically, start over again in a new Project with the files that FCE can't find.
Like I said; a conjecture.
Good luck.
Lights Out/ Frank in Florida

Similar Messages

"._" files littering my external NTFS drive

I purchased a USB external drive and formatted it on my Windows PC. I wanted NTFS rather than FAT32.
I use MacFuse on my Mac in order to write to it.
I copied around 14000 files to this drive from my Mac. No issues copying.
Now, I am on vacation with my external drive and my Windows laptop. On the drive, every single file has been duplicated with a second file that starts a "._" in the filename.
I read online that this is some odd resource fork part of the file that the Mac creates when you copy stuff to a Windows formatted drive.
I want to delete all of these ridiculous files from my external drive. I found a Mac program called BlueHarvest, but for the next two weeks, I only have my Windows XP laptop.
How can I get rid of these stupid 4k files? Is there a Windows version of a program that can do this?
Apple, in the future, how can I turn off the creation of all these worthless files, especially .DS_Store, .Trashes, .Spotlight, etc.
THanks for any advice,
Chris

No trouble in those files or in deleting them.
Watch out for file names. Things that are valid for HFS+ are not on NTFS, and caused mayham to Vista.
What I did was just search for and delete all those files you are asking about, and more, like any of the .DS also.
The files are created to store folder and file information.
What would be better would be to use a program when copying, to skip copying hidden and invisible files. And putting "." in front of a file just makes it hidden in OS X.
You can just search and delete. I had to delete tens of thousands. And I now keep all my files on NTFS that I can. I also bought NTFS driver a year ago, having tried MacFUSE also, Paragon-Software cost $29 at the time and performed better. Haven't tried the new MacFUSE 2.x that just came out.

Change Sharing & Permission on External NTFS drive?

I have an external hard drive that was originally used with a windows machine (NTFS format). How can I change the Sharing & permissions to allow me to modify the drive?

Well, you can't change the NTFS sharing & permissions per se ...
But OS X can read & copy files from the NTFS disk to another disk.
If you also need to write to an NTFS disk, you will need NTFS for Mac. (or similar utility).
If you no longer need an NTFS formatted disk, copy all the files you need to keep - and then use Disk Utility to reformat the disk as Mac OS Extended. Reformatting erases the disk, so you need to backup (copy) anything you want to keep (before reformatting the disk.)

Macbook won't recognize external NTFS drive

I've mounted a NTFS-formatted 3.5" drive into an external case. But, when I plug it into my mac, it can't read it. Disk utility reads it as disk2s1, but I can't see my glorious collection that it holds.
I've done the exact same process with another disk, and it worked perfectly. Any ideas?
Thanks, as always, for any help.

What worries me about the Fuse options is this. MacOS X (10.4.11) is supposed to be able to read NTFS drives, but not write to them. I don't want to write to mine, just get the data off of it. It's a 250GB Western Digital Internal Drive, being connected to my MacBook Pro via an enclosure that lets me connect via USB. Disk Utility sees the external drive but will not mount it.
I'm concerned about installing something when the native OS is not doing something it is supposed to be able to do.

External NTFS drive and Spotlight

I try to look for a file on Hard Disk but Spotlight don't Search on this NTFS drive disk!
My friend suggested that I write:
sudo mdutil-i on / Volumes / New Volume
but doesn't work
http://files.macit.co.il/194879aforum01.png
Another guy suggested:
sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/New Volume
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/New Volume
sudo \rm -fr /.Spotlight-V100
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/New Volume
but i didn't past the first Command
http://files.macit.co.il/194879aforum01.png
They told me that I need to press enter after the i Write the command and i did.
What else can i do?
By the way I run thi on my i Leopard
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2008/01/ntfs-3g-12129.html
Message was edited by: ariel26

are you able to write to the NTFS drive after installing NTFS-3g? if not then spotlight indexing won't work. if you can write to that drive then you do need to run the first terminal command but you need to run it correctly. the syntax of the command the way you wrote it is wrong in several places.
it should be
sudo mdutil -i on /volumes/"drive name"
please copy and paste the command. put the name of the drive in it. KEEP the quotation marks.

Windows 7 64-bit Corrupting (Altering) Large Files Copied to External NTFS Drives

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproperf/thread/13a7426e-1a5d-41b0-9e16-19437697f62b/
continue to this thread, I have the same problems, the corrupted files only archives, zip or 7z ... and exe, there are no problems copying larg files like movies for example, no problem when copying via linux in the same laptop, it is a windows issue, I
have all updates installed, nothing missing

Ok, lets be brief.
This problem is annoying me for years. It is totally reproducible although random. It happens when copying to external drives (mainly USB) when they are configured for "safe removal". I have had issues copying to NTFS and FAT32 partitions. I have had issues
using 4 different computers, from 7 years old to brand new ones, using AMD or intel chipsets and totally different USB controllers, and using many different USB sticks, hard disks, etc. The only common thing in those computers is Windows 7 x64 and the external
drives optimization for "safe removal". Installing Teracopy reduces the chances of data corrpution, but does not eliminate them completely. The only real workaround (tested for 2 years) is activating the write cache in the device manager properties of the
drive. In that way, windows uses the same transfer mechanisms as for the internal drives, and everything is OK.
MICROSOFT guys, there is a BIG BUG in windows 7 x64 external drives data transfer mechanism. There is a bug in the cache handling mechanism of the safe removal function. Nobody hears, I've been years talking about this in forums. It is a very dangerous bug
because it is silent, and many non professional people is experiencing random errors in their backup data. PLEASE, INVESTIGATE THIS. YOU NEED TO FIX SUCH IMPORTANT BUG. IT IS UNBELIEVABLE THAT IT IS STILL THERE SINCE 2009!!!
Hope this helps.

Finder: Doesn't search external ntfs drive's volumes

Hi everyone
I have an NTFS-formatted external drive connected through USB to my Mac Pro. The drive has four volumes, which show up properly in Finder.
The problem is that I can't search these volumes with Spotlight.
What happens is that I select the relevant volume in Finder's sidebar and type in my search phrase, for example ".mp3" without the quotes, in the search box.
The computer then starts searching "This Mac", instead of the volume I clicked, and lists all the mp3s I have on the internal drive.
There's a bar above Finder's "column bar" and below the buttons bar where the Spotlight search window is. This bar appears after the search and there I can click the name of the volume, which is next to a button labeled "This Mac". Clicking the drive name starts a search however it invariably ends up displaying zero items, regardless of what I search for.
I have tried adding the external volumes to Spotlight's "Privacy" list and then remove them from that list in order to hopefully jump start the indexing. But nothing happens. There is neither renewed indexing, nor am I able to display any results when using Spotlight as described above.
Any thoughts? I've tried to eject the volumes, restart the computer, attach the volumes again etc. I really hope there's nothing serious because the computer is all new and I just want to transfer all my files and then use the external drive for Time Machine. But in order to do so I need to know that I have moved everything first.
Thanks for your help.
/p

I am unable to get Spotlight to index my "Journaled" external HD.
I use External HD for storing music videos. I need to be able to Spotlight the video by the name/metadata. (And I have just a couple of minutes to execute the process.)

Moving or copying files from my Mac to my external NTFS drive.

I use Boot-camp on my MacBook and use it as both a PC and a MAC. Because of space issues I need to use an external drive for storage and because a lot of my files are over 4g I can only use NTFS as a formatting option.
My problem is I can't copy or move anything from my Mac to the drive, which is really annoying. With Itunes for instance I read all my music from the drive (which works fine) but I can't download anything using Itunes now because it won't write to the drive.
Surely this is only a permission thing with Mac that be altered - Can anyone help?

Hi and welcome to Discussions,
it is not a permission issue you experience.
FAT32 is the only file system, that both OSX and Windows can read and write to without additional help.
NTFS is a modern file system for Windows, but OSX can only read from it.
For write access from OSX you can use either NTFS-3G http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ or buy Paragons NTFS for Mac http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
OSX uses Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as file system, which Windows can't see nor use without the help of MacDrive http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
Since FAT32 is no option for you, because of the implemented singel-file size limitation of 4GB, I personally would propose NTFS in combination with NTFS-3G or Paragon.
Hope it helps
Stefan

IMac with External NTFS Drive

Hi,
I've just switched from Windows XP to Apple, got myself a 20" iMac. I've an external 300Gb harddrive formatted as NTFS, which is readonly in OS X, it about 60% full.
Is there a mac utility out there or on my mac, which i can re-partition the external harddrive for the user from my imac, so that i can move some of my unwanted stuff to external drive for backup purposes.
Any suggestions
Regards
Sajid

Hi sajidazmi;
No. Not as long a the drive is formated NTFS. OS X is not capable of writing to NTFS. If you want write to the drive, it will have to be reformatted which means all the data on the drive will be lost.
Allan

Cannot see ntfs drive after trying macfuse

I seem to have messed things up. I could once plug in an external ntfs drive and read it just fine. But then I thought about writing to it, so I tried macfuse with ntfs-3g. I couldn't get it going so I uninstalled according to their FAQ. Now I can't even see the ntfs drive. One note: if I go through disk utility it shows the drive being recognized and mounted. But /Volumes/mydrive is empty.
Thoughts?

the superdrive, it works fine in osx not in windows 8 on boot camp

External Hard Drive not mounting on bootup

I have a USB2.0 Hard Drive formatted with ntfs, which holds my music. I have an fstab entry for it using ntfs-3g and I can mount it fine after booting up. But the drive doesn't automatically mount like it should. It looks like the system is mounting the fstab entries before it is finished detecting my external drive. Anything I can do to fix this?

fwojciec wrote:I let my external ntfs drive be mounted by hal - I have no entry for it in /etc/fstab. In order to have it mounted with read/write privileges I had to create a hal policy like this wiki page describes: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HAL … ntfs-3g.29
I'm not sure if this solution is what you're looking for though...
I actually tried using hal to do it and it didn't work right for some reason.

How to move files from an external hard drive to a time capsule that is part of an extended network

What are the steps for copying or transferring 235 GB of files (primarily .mts movie files) that are on a Western Digital external hard drive to a 500 GB Time Capsule that I want to use as an external hard drive? After the files have been moved, I will be returning the Western Digital external hard drive to my son's coach and will be using iMovie to access the 500 GB Time Capsule to create a highlight video.
Currently, I have a 1TB Time Capsule that is serving as the wireless router for my network and for Time Machine backups to two Macs. The 500GB Time Capsule is set up as an extended part of the 1TB Time Capsule's network.
I can copy and paste files from the Western Digital exernal hard drive to the Desktop of my iMac but when I try to move a file from the Western Digitial external hard drive to the empty 500 GB Time Capsule, the following error message pops up:
"The item “filename” can’t be moved because “Linda's Time Capsule (2)” can’t be modified."
Thank you. Linda

Click anywhere on the open desktop so that the Finder menus are displayed at the top of the screen.
Click Go > Network
Double click the Time Capsule icon, then double click the icon representing the drive to mount it on the Mac's desktop. It is named "Data" unless you have changed it
You can drag/drop files to the "Data" icon on the desktop
235 GB is going to take forever if you try to do this using wireless. If at all possible, connect an Ethernet cable from your Mac to one of the LAN <-> ports on the Time Capsule.
Even using Ethernet, you are probably looking at 10-12 hours for the file transfer. All bets are off with wireless only, but a guess would be several days....or even more.

Can't See NTFS drive no matter what i do / install / code

I've read and read and read and read and read. then installed, uninstalled, deleted, coded... no matter what i do i CAN"T get my mac to see my external NTFS drive for the life of me.
i'm about to distroy the stupid pc a friend gave me but fist i need to get the 1T of movies/music/tv shoes off the HD.
PLEASE HELP PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!!!!
thanks
jIM
mountain lion (latest update)
mid 2010 MBP 8 gigs ram

Can anyone help me?? No matter what i do my MBP won't bring up the drives.. doesn't see them, no error messages nothing... they seem to work fine on the windows box but not matter what i install / uninstall the mac just won't see them.... anyone???

Trouble with external hard drive and disk repair

So I save my music and photos to an external hard drive. The drive is partitioned to also be the back up for my Time Machine. I live in an old house with the electricity for my MacBook Pro and the external hard drive coming from a wall plug which drapes scrape over when opening and closing, occasionally moving the plugs to the point of cutting off the electricity. Sometimes when that happens, the MacBook Pro won't read the external hard drive and I have to restart the computer for it to read the HD.
Well, this seems to have happened again, only this time it wasn't reading the HD when restarted. I Opened the Disk Utility and did a verify disk, and was told that I couldn't save anything to the drive, but to access the files that were on there. So I attempted to do a disk repair. What happens at that point is instead of getting the solid blue line indicating the repair is happening, I get the barber pole blue line indicating it's trying to access the HD to begin repair. This goes on for hours at a time without the repair taking place.
Can anyone out there give me a "for Dummies" overview of how to get the Disk Utility to repair things?
Thanks.

What I was trying to tell you is that all the music and photos that are on the same drive as your Time Machine backup must also be backed up elsewhere. Unlike all the stuff on your primary (internal) hard drive, those photos and music are not backed up at all unless you have copies of them on a different drive. If your Time Machine hard drive should fail before you do that, they'll all be lost. So copy all the music and photos to your second external hard drive as soon as you are able to do so.
I generally consider the nuisance of backing up extra hard drives to other extra hard drives burdensome and annoying enough so that I always upgrade my primary (internal) hard drive whenever I begin to run short of space on the one I'm using. Now that it's possible to get 750GB and 1TB internal drives for MBPs, I'll get one of those as soon as my present 250GB drive fills up to about 80% of its capacity. I don't want to lug around an external drive in order to have all my stuff with me when I'm away from my home or office — I want it all on my internal drive, and I want to be able to back all of it up at once to an external drive of the same or a larger size. At least until I outgrow a 1TB drive, and I think that will be a while.

IMovie8, External Hard Drive and iMovie11

I have multiple issues here.
I have flim clips of sports my kids taken from game film. So an "event" might be several clips or an entire game, and the Project would be the highlights. Some projects are just my kids ( ) and some projects are the year end team highlight videos. Obviously some clips are used multiple times. I want to move these to use on a new computer that has iMovie11, but I want to keep them on an external hard drive.
THe problem is, this is what I THOUGHT I had done four years ago when I backed up a computer onto HD, But from what I've read here, Since I didn't do it through imovie itself, I might have broken some sort of connection and this projects are now history becaue I didn't move the events, only the projects themselves. Yes?
Moving forward, I want to make sure I don't lose any of this stuff. It's right up there with a iPhoto library to me.
I've read about this media consolidation that will link events to projects, but was that available in iMovie08? (the version I am working with) If so, I cannot find it and would appreciate direction.
But if I cant consolidate media, then how do I do it? It'd be great if you could move iMovie like Iphoto and just choose a different library, but I assume that's not happening.
So, can I just manually move all these files to the external HD thru imovie (I get that you don't do it through finder)? Although, the problem there is that when I connect my external HD (formated to MAC OS Extended Journaled), the HD disc only shows up under events and not under projects. It doesnt seem to allow me to drag and drop to it either. So although I could feasibly drag and drop all the events, how do I move the actual inprogress projects so they don't drop anything, especially if I can't use finder to do so?
Once I move all of this to an external hard drive, the HOPE is that I might be able to continue editing them on my new macbook that has iMovie11.
And One last thing: Is there any way to move an iDVD project INTACT to an external hard drive so that you can come back and burn more copies later? The one or two DVD projects that I moved to this external hard drive are completely empty now. Which, again, is disappointing.
I was going to use migration assistant, but the truth is, I don't want everything that's on this old laptop on my new one. And after reading how you had to move things IN iMovie, I was afraid I'd break the links to everything! Too scary to even consider.
Sorry so long, but I moved these other files with the help of OnetoOne in the Apple Store last time and obviously, they didn't do it right because none of those projects will play now.

I also moved some files after creating a project: When I attempted to burn the project to a disc I was given an error message along with a listing of the missing files. This is most likely the long way around to rebuilding your projects but might solve one of your issues.

External NTFS drive coming up empty

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for