Issues Mounting An External Hard Drive

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Issues Mounting An External Hard Drive

I've had an NTFS hard drive I've been using on my Macbook Pro. It always mounted without issue, but I could never write to it due to it being NTFS. So it was read-only basically. Which was fine; I used a Windows computer to write to the drive and used my Mac to work from it. However, I bought a new drive of the same type, and decided to use that as an excuse to try to figure out a way to make these drives writable from my Mac. I downloaded software from iBoysoft to try to make the Mac compatible to write to the drives. I later learned that it was a paid subscription service, so I removed the application and went to explore other options. However, installing that app removed my ability to even mount the drives, so not only can I not write to them, I can no longer read from them i.e. work from them. The error I'm getting is Diskmanagement.disenter error 49223. I have tried several web search solutions aside from formatting the drives because I cannot lose the data on them. Tried a lot of suggested solutions entering text commands into Terminal, but nothing has worked so far. I can't find anyone else with my situation, being that mounting was never an issue until installing an application to try and make them writable. FYI the drives still read and write fine on my Windows computer, so I think the issue/change is within the Mac. Any tips are appreciated

MacBook Pro 14″

Posted on Jan 20, 2024 7:04 AM

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HWTech

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Jan 20, 2024 10:42 AM in response to mattswagger

Software like that installs drivers (aka extensions) into the bowels of macOS and being it is for an NTFS driver, the software must also modify some system settings to make sure the third party driver is utilized instead of the default built-in read-only NTFS driver. You must uninstall the iBoysoft software by following iBoysoft's instructions. There should either be an "uninstall" option somewhere in the iBoysoft app or System Setting panel, or they should provide a separate uninstaller app on their website (or maybe the installer app has the uninstall option). After running the iBoysoft uninstaller, you will need to reboot the computer.

Unfortunately I do not know what system preference file was modified by iBoysoft to force the use of their NTFS driver, so you must rely on the iBoysoft uninstaller or iBoysoft's tech support for properly uninstalling & removing all parts of their software.

Failing that, then I would recommend a clean install of macOS by first erasing the disk followed by reinstalling macOS & restoring from a backup made before you installed the iBoysoft software. You may need to also manually restore any data files from a later TM backup if there were any modifications. Or you can restore from the most recent TM backup, but avoid restoring any apps or settings since that would just bring the problem back.

FYI, if you need to share a drive between macOS & Windows, then it is usually best to use Disk Utility on macOS to erase the whole physical drive as GUID partition and exFAT so you can read & write data using both macOS & Windows. However, Apple did change the exFAT driver with macOS 14.x Sonoma (changed it from a Kernel base driver to a user land driver)...so there may be some issues with macOS being able to access some exFAT volumes. Hard to say since most people having those issues don't provide enough details to figure out the source of the problem. I would still prefer using the exFAT file system using the native macOS driver than relying on a third party NTFS driver which could break with a simple macOS update patch (has occurred several times in the past). If you do want to use a third party NTFS driver, then the Paragon driver seems to be the most common one as it is usually included in the proprietary software provided by most manufacturers of external drives.

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Issues Mounting An External Hard Drive

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