Can't write to a Windows formatted external hard disk

I moved the Windows XP formatted external hard disc from the Windows machine to the Imac. I can read files on the hard disc, can write from the external to the Mac, and can work with the files once they are on the Mac. But I cannot write to the external. I lack permission, the error message says.
I talked with Apple via my AppleCare arrangement. They tell me I will have to reformat the disc for the Mac before I can write to it.
The problem with the recommendation is that that disc, 160 gb, is over three-quarters filled with backup files for the home network. I can't afford to lose them.
The puzzle is that the network sharing is uneven. So I'm led to think there is some problem with my setup. From the Mac, I can read and write to two Windows computers and the internal hard disc, the C drive, of the third. When the external hard disc was attached to that third computer, I was never able to see it from the Mac.
None of the Windows machines can see the Mac.
Any suggestions?
John
IMac Intel Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.6)

When you go over a network, the Mac doesn't have to worry about writing to the destination disk, it just sends the appropriate TCP/IP packets and lets the PC that is serving the disk worry about writing to the disk. When the disk is connected directly, then the Mac has to know all about writing to that file system.
It does seem to me that if Apple could read from the drive, they should be able to write to it, but apparently that was more complicated and they didn't implement it.
As for the windows boxen not being able to see the Mac... have you considered installing Bonjour for Windows onto the PCs? My wife has PCs and I have Macs, but we're all networked together. We were having some networking issues, trying to share printers. So I had her install Bonjour on one of her boxes. Suddenly, all our networking problems went away. She could see my printers, and all my drive shares.
So you might want to think about turning thinga around and serving off of the Mac.
Doc

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Mac Pro Notebook to see, read & write to PC Windows 7 External Hard Disk NTFS

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I have a Windows 7 PC desktop with an external hard disk coonected to it by USB formatted as NTFS. Is is connected by cable to a wireless router.
I now also have a Macbook Pro.
I would like to work on jpg and Raw files on the External Hard Disk both via the desktop (as I currently do) and also now via the Macbook using Photoshop Elements which exists on both.
Is there a way that the Macbook can read the external drive and read and write the same files as the pc without purchasing a Macdrive and reformatting the External Drive?
Thank you
Regards
CGJ

Hi everyone
I've managed to work out how to share my desktop and the external drive attached to it via wireless so my Macbook Pro can see, open, and edit and save photo files via Photoshop Elements.
I can also then view and edit them through the Windows PC - though they say some properties are missing this I can live with.
Therefore no re-formatting needed, and no downloads either.
Many thanks
Regards

Can i use windows migration assistant to transfer files from my windows formatted external hard drive to my mac?

I have a windows formatted external hard drive and a macbook pro. I was wondering if i could use the windows migration assistant to transfer files from my external hard drive to the mac

No.
Just connect the drive to your Mac. The Mac can read most Windows formats (it cannot WRITE Windows New Technology File System (NTFS) formatted drives.

NTFS formatted external hard disks?

does mountain lion supports writing on NTFS formatted external hard disks?

I'm getting immense slow-downs using Tuxera NTFS (latest release as of August 2012). I moved my home folder to an NTFS shared drive. Reading/writing to the cache while browsing in Safari is slow. Takes about 30 seconds for Finder to open my NTFS drive, takes about 1 minute to open an app and close the app. If I disable Tuxera NTFS and make my drive read-only, everything goes back to snappy performance (except for write-errors, since disabling Tuxera means I can't write to my home folder).
What shocks me the most is that if you visit the Tuxera community forum on their corporate website, none of their support representatives have helped their customers since the release of Tuxera NTFS for OS X Mountain Lion. It's as if the company realized they messed up, so they went silent.
I'm about to try the latest version of Paragon. I had it for OS X Lion, but it corrupted my entire drive after 2 months of use, which is why I tried to give Tuxera a shot. Here's to hoping Paragon has fixed their issues.

Why I can't do a search in my external hard disk using Adobe Bridge CS6?

When I open Adobe Bridge CS6 and try to do a search within my external hard disk, it will give results from my internal hardisk only?! this is the 1st time I encounterd such strange issue. Because of this I do my search with windows and then browse each result with Bridge! which really annoying.

I solved the problem by going to the search field and clicking on the search icon where it will give a drop list of 3 options, then selecting Bridge Search: Current Folder and that solved my problem. thanks for everyone help
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 06:45:55 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Why I can't do a search in my external hard disk using Adobe Bridge CS6?
    Re: Why I can't do a search in my external hard disk using Adobe Bridge CS6?
    created by Curt Y in Bridge General Discussion - View the full discussion
You can do a search of an external drive if the OS permissions are OK. Bridge will not search across different drives however.
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Cant write/edit data on my external hard disk! Help please!~~

Okay guys, currently, i'm using Tiger version 10.4.11. My problem is that i cant edit data or write data to any external hard disks, like the maxtor One Touch and so on. Only thing i can do is to extract the data from the disks. I have tried to write on multiple hard disks but in all my attempts i have failed. i've tried to edit my network settings, but no results.
So, i seek help from anyone out here!

Hello, yea.. thanks man =)
Basically, its a shared hard disk between my macbook and a windows PC. So i kinda use the PC to write all my backups and data on the hard disk.
I have quite a few hard disk and they all have the same issue. It says 'The item 'file x'cannot be moved because 'my hard disk' cannot be modified.'I've used the software provided from the hard disk manufacturer, Maxtor/Seagate, to reformat the brand new portable hard disk which i bought yesterday.
Its connected via USB, same as all the other ones i have.
eh. the get info for it says
Kind: Volume
Created: --
Modified: Thursday, 23 Aprl 2009 3:24AM
Format: Windows NT Filesystem
Capacity: 232.88 GB
Available: 232.57 GB
Ownerships & Permissions: You can only read.
erm... its a portable drive which i carry around, so i guess its not a network drive? and how doi determine the network settings? Sorry man.. not really good at these =x

Disk write cache corruption on an external hard disk

Recently I purchased an external hard disk, to put all of my pictures of my baby due to space limitations on my internal laptop drive. Since my Canon camera 10 megapixel pictures take up a ton of space this was occurring at an alarming rate. My intention was also to back up to DVD but never got to it. This is both a comment and a question.
Now said baby, is getting really good at pulling cords etc. He managed to do this on the external drive firewire cable. As far as i know the drive was not in the process of actually writing. However, after a few minutes and trying to re-plug the drive the OS crashed with a Grey Screen of Death hardware error that tells you that you need to push the power button..
This apparently corrupted the drive's directory. Upon reboot the drive would not mount. Since there were time machine backups on the drive too Diskwarrior was not able to reconstruct the drive in the built in memory available on the computer. Time machine stores millions of files and Diskwarrior apparently wants to keep it all in memory at once. Since my computer has 2GB you would hope that would be enough but apparently not. So that failed. Other utilities seemed to be able to find the files but not restore the directory. I also took it to the apple store they were not able to recover it.
I have to say this is extremely distressing, and hard to believe that a simple accident like this could cost the loss of thousands of pictures. I did send it to a rescue company but that was expensive but I think apple needs to do something about this situation.
On Windows there is a way to disable the write cache for external drives. This is not available for Mac OS X. This would prevent this rather common occurrence of a plug accidentally becoming disengaged when the drive is not in the process of writing. This reduces the odds but I still think apple, in order to become clearly superior, needs a better solution.
I know Apple has experimented with ZFS would this not eliminate this possibility of this kind of disaster? Is this in Snow Leopard desktop? I know they are thinking this is a business customer focused technology but clearly if it can eliminate this kind of thing then I think it is extremely useful to their non server customers. Perhaps there are other ways of dealing with this issue but ZFS is designed to deal with these issues. HFS+ is extremely fragile to disk corruption.
I know my situation is not that uncommon and this is not the first time this has happened to me with an external drive. You would think I had learned. I hate to think of how many other people have had the same thing happen to them.

Disabling a write cache would not help you with the problem you are having. Besides the write cache is on the hard drive and operates independently of the operating system. But nothing can protect you from disconnected an external drive improperly, and if the drive is in the process of being written to, and the problem comes from directory corruption, not file corruption, as in the case you have described, disabling a write cache would not have made any difference.
For the future the magic word is: Backups.
< Edited by Host >

I am not able to delete or write my files to my external hard disk drive what shall i do?

i am teja i brought a new mac book air here i am not able to write or delete the files that are present in a external hard disk drive what shall i do now to enable required permisions................plz reply me i am new to mac

I guess your external drive is Windows (NTFS) formattet.
By default you were only able to read from that drive, as Mac doesent support NTFS write.
If you want to have read/write access to a NTFS volume you have to use add-in tools like MacFuse or Paragon on your Mac.
Not having write or delete permissions on the external drive may also preventyou from changing existing files on that drive.
Right click on the drive in Finder and choose "Information" from the menu will give you more information about the reasons of your problem.
Lupunus

Finder cannot searching for NTFS formatted external hard disk

MacBookAir,1.8GhZ,Memory 4GB1600 MHz DDR3
osx10.9.3
Finder can show and open the files from the external hard disk but can not searching for the files.

Barney-15E wrote:
Tuxera or paragon will give you write access, but I don't know if that will allow Spotlight to work on those drives.
A brief experiment suggests that Spotlight does not index an NTFS volume driven by Paragon NTFS. I don't have a copy of Tuxera to test.
Sorry, cchaikittiporn. Paragon does not seem to be a solution for your issue.

Cannot Write Files to my Formatted External Hard-drive

I've been struggling with this problem for awhile now. I have a 200GB external hard drive that I used on my windows box. I have music on it and would like to use it on my macbook. When I plug it into my macbook, it mounts and shows up on the desktop. I can go into it in finder, and view the files and folders that are on it. I can also create new folders. However, when I try to read or write files to/from the hard drive, finder stalls at 'zero KB of x MB written'. If I try to copy a file to the drive, the file will be created but it will be of zero or very very small size.
I reformatted the drive with Disk Utility and also via the command line with 'diskutil reformat /dev/disk1s5' and these reformat the drive successfully, but the same problems occur.
What could be going on? The drive is not faulty, and it mounts just fine. I just can't read or write from the drive in OS X.
Please help! Thank you in advance.

The NTFS file format is not really that compatible with macs (you can only "read" files, but not "write" to them). Also, while you can reformat a hard drive with the same or different file type, the NTFS type is the only one that will not let you go from having a NTFS formatted drive and reformatting it as a different format (you can do it again as NTFS but that's it). If you have a FAT or FAT32 formatted drive, you can go and reformat it as NTFS, but once it has had the newer windows format style done to it, you can't change it to anything else.
Also, as I think you said you could read from it at first, and then were not able to?, this would be because the reading of the files would have been fine, but as soon as you went and reformatted it again (which basically wipes the slate clean), you lost all the data that possibly was on there, and now as an NTFS format with no data, therefore nothing for a Mac to get a chance to "read", you have nothing and can only use this as an NTFS drive for windows (or any other possible OS that is NTFS compatible).
Sorry about the bad news... Try to sell it to a windows person and get another external hard drive (formatted as FAT32 or not pre-formatted yet, then format as FAT32) so that you can use that with your Mac...

Formatting external hard disks

What is the best way to reformat an external hard drive from MS-DOS to MacOS?
My disk utility software (macOS 10.5.8) refuses to delete and reformat a new toshiba hd (STOR.E ALU 2, 1 TB).

Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

Time taken to format external hard disk

I have just purchased a 1T external hard drive and now using the erase disk to reformat from FAT-32 to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I let this run over night (8 hours), however in the morning it still had not finished. As I thought it may have frozen I went to Finder & force quit the disk utility function. I have now started again after reading other posts, but I' can't seem to find anyway giving me an indication of how long this should take. Any suggestions??
Also, I have not used any of the security options.

Normally a reformat to Mac format takes about a minute, maybe less. Do you have one of the options turned on to "zero all data" or one of the other heavy duty "kill all data" check boxes selected when formatting?
Patrick

How Can I get read and write permission for NTFS formatted external Hard Drive?

How can I use my external formatted disk on MAC with full permissions?

Install software such as Paragon NTFS on the computer.
(63161)

New User Question: Can I move music from internal to external hard disk?

I just downloaded iTunes today, and am in the process of copying my CD music folders and converting the WMA music to the correct format. As I'm doing this, it occurs to me that I might have to move my music folders off of my internal hard drive and onto an external one because I'm running out of room on my internal disk. If I move my music folders, will iTunes still be able to find my music? Many thanks.
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Format External Hard Disk

I've bought an external HDD which has not been formatted. I'd like to use it on both Windows and Mac. I know Fat32 format will do the trick but how do I format the harddisk into Fat32?

Hi Leiya Lee
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regards roam

Can't write to a Windows formatted external hard disk

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