Formatted NTFS hard drive not recognizable on Windows machine

03
2014-01
  • LWZ

    I bought a Seagate external hard drive, formatted it to NTFS (Tuxera) with my iMac and backed up a few hundred GB from the iMac. But when I plug the hard drive on a Windows 7 machine, it says it could not read the drive and asked me to format it!

    So now I can only use the hard drive on my Mac. Is there something wrong with how Mac formats an NTFS drive? Is there a way to fix it so I can also use it on Windows too? It is actually the reason why I formatted it to NTFS in the first place because I want to use it on both.

    • Answers
  • Josh

    In my experience, formats from OSX don't play nice with Windows. The other way around works fine however.

    I would put the data back onto OSX and then format the drive in Windows as Fat32. Then it will work on OSX and you can copy the data onto the drive and it will still work on Windows.

    Is the data in question to be used on both Windows and OSX? That seems overly hopeful....


    • Related Question

    Snow Leopard not reading NTFS
  • dtmunir

    I just upgraded a brand new Macbook Pro that I bought with 10.5 installed to Snow Leopard.

    After doing the upgrade I am trying to access NTFS partitions on my external hard drive but they are just not showing up. I went ahead and installed Windows 7 using Parallels, and I can access the NTFS partitions from within Windows, but not from Mac OS X. I know that Snow Leopard should be able to at least read NTFS drives, so what is going on here?


    • Related Answers
  • alex

    As a temporary solution until you can get NTFS to natively work, I suggest using MacFuse and ntfs3g (I've used them in Leopard and the experience is pretty seamless). To be honest, I'm pretty sure that's what Apple uses in Snow Leopard anyway. They are free, mature, open-source projects, that are also used in various Linux distributions to enable the NTFS read/write capability.

  • Benjamin Schollnick

    Under Windows's Device Manager, do you see the drives? Are they active?

    If they are disabled / de-activated, they won't be seen or shown... I do this with my Mac partitions, since I don't want the Windows Antivirus software to be scanning those drives, nor allow a virus to damage those drives, if I do get infected.

    Opps, misread the question...

    Does Disk Utility see the drives? If so, what partition type is shown? Are you sure it's a NTFS partition? Did you ever install NTFS3G on your system? It could be conflicting with the standard NTFS drivers...