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...

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marimbapony1 wrote:
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Hello support community
The problem: when I insert my 'FAT' formatted external hard drive (Samsung M3) into my mac book pro it comes up with the error message that says "the inserted disk is not readable by this computer" and I therefore cannot access the files.
The story (potential further details):
1. I had a problem with my mac where it took hours to load each time I turned it on, would only work when power was plugged in etc. so I had to reformat my mac hard drive (when I tried to veriify it said repair, that wouldn't work). So i'm starting with a recently reformatted, clean mac.
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The technical details:
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Sept. 2010, Consolidate selected content - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2589812 and April 2014, https://discussions.apple.com/message/25414357
"...selected the new tracks directly in iTunes, Control-clicked on the selection, and saw that now you can consolidate selected items." - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090919000326840
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Okay, I am going to stop typing because you might just reply to me, "Oh, okay, forget it," and I don't need the exercise.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391

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http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26288/ntfs-for-mac-os-x
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
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The demo is also fully functional for 30 days.

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PRAM
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support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
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lisacooney wrote:
I have recently moved all of my files to a larger external hard drive
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Cannot Write Files to my Formatted External Hard-drive

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