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User profile for user: Emma7227d
Emma7227d Author
User level: Level 1
5 points

External Hard Drive - Files not Showing

Good Morning

I have recently purchased an M1 MacBook Pro - my first Mac computer. I have tried to access some files I have stored on a Seagate 1TB external hard drive this morning but I am having some problems. I have connected via a USB-A to USB-C adapter and the drive is visible on the desktop and mounted but when I open it the files are not visible in the finder. They are definitely on the drive when I view using a windows PC and you can see in the properties when I go to about this Mac and storage that the files are present on the drive as the correct amount of used storage is showing but they are just not visible. The drive shows as a Windows NTFS system on the disk utility option. Can anybody help? Do I need to change the format of the driver to view on Mac? If so can I do this without wiping the drive?

Thanks in advance for your help

Emma

Posted on Dec 11, 2020 1:18 AM

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 9
60,332 points

Dec 11, 2020 6:08 PM in response to Emma7227d

I've seen a lot of posts on these forums mentioning issues accessing data on USB drives (especially formatted as NTFS) when using the new M1 Macs. I don't know what is going on there.


macOS can natively read NTFS volumes, but cannot natively write to an NTFS volume without installing a proprietary third party NTFS driver. In theory there should be no problem reading from an NTFS formatted external drive. Out of curiosity what partition type is being used on the external drive? MBR or GUID?


It is best to have macOS manage the external drives. If a drive needs to be shared with Windows, then it is best to format the drive with exFAT using Disk Utility (erase the drive as GUID partition and exFAT). If the external drive will only be used with macOS, then erase it as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled).

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External Hard Drive - Files not Showing

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