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I'm trying to get an external harddrive formatted in NTFS to be recognized on a Mac Air. Plug it into a USB port, the power light on the external case lights up, but no activity and the Mac doesn't act like it sees the HDD. Is there any special routine you have to follow to get the HDD to be recognized on the Mac?
Mac OS X recognises (i.e. can see) NTFS as well as FAT32.
However, Mac OS X can only read NTFS formatted HDD(normally why people format thier drives to the FAT32 file system format as it can read and write that format)
The solution for you is a implementation called MacFUSE which makes it possible to use any FUSE (File-system in USErspace) file systems in Mac. And the most useful FUSE is the NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver, which ables system to load NTFS with read and write capability.
That or convert the drive into FAT32 (not really a good idea)
The other option is STOP USING FUCKING MACS, but thats more of a bias answer. As well doesn't solve much.
I couldn't agree more, Macs sux. But the person I'm trying to help is using a Mac, so no choice. Shouldn't the Mac at least register that the drive is detected, even if it can't read or write to the disk?
I just had a thought, if you take an NTFS protected disk and put it in an external enclosure and try to access it on another PC or Mac, will the file protections and access restrictions still be in place? I'd say no, but maybe there's something I'm not thinking about.
Macs will not automatically mount NTFS drives that weren't unmounted cleanly. In other words, if he yanked the plug without properly ejecting the drive first, it won't work. I'm guessing that's what the problem is.
With MacFUSE it is possible to force it to mount a drive that wasn't cleanly unmounted from the command line, but the easy solution is to plug the drive back into a Windows computer, run scandisk on it, and then eject it properly.
Unfortunately the only Windows PC available won't detect the drive either. The HDD was taken out of a Dell that won't power on. When you plug in the external drive to a PC, it powers on, but no detection and no activity. When you plug it into the Mac, power light comes on but nothing happens.
So do I need to mount the drive? It's a Mac Air, so whichever OS comes with that.
Sounds like the HDD is fried. Even when it's dead it can often still power up (the motor that spins the discs) but the circuits that read and write are dead. Although i'm no expert on the subject and i have no idea how you can actually make sure. But to me it sounds like it's dead.
The fact that you tried it on both a Mac and a PC and it doesn't even register that a device (working or faulty) is present at all should indicate that it doesn't send or answer signals at all so the PC can even detect that a device is present.
Could it be that the external enclosure is faulty? I've had that happen before where an external adapter can't read harddrives, but others could.