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Error -50 when copying files from external drive

When copying from my external (I use on windows computer and all works fine) to my Mac it keeps giving me an error

if I copy other files from a different drive some work and some do the same thing. I’m confused and frustrated

any help would be great

thanks

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 15.0

Posted on Oct 15, 2024 1:43 PM

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Posted on Oct 15, 2024 6:53 PM

What file format is the external drive - Windows NTFS?


Are you copying the files to your Mac, or trying to move them (dragging them and releasing while holding the cmd key) - because Macs cannot write to NTFS file systems, only read from them. And that includes file operations of any kind that make changes on a NTFS source drive.

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Oct 15, 2024 6:53 PM in response to CraigRomburgh

What file format is the external drive - Windows NTFS?


Are you copying the files to your Mac, or trying to move them (dragging them and releasing while holding the cmd key) - because Macs cannot write to NTFS file systems, only read from them. And that includes file operations of any kind that make changes on a NTFS source drive.

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Oct 16, 2024 5:26 PM in response to CraigRomburgh

So, copying may be writing to the NTFS drive (e.g., file metadata like modification dates) in a way that fails and the error kills the whole copy process.


Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with NTFS drive formats on basic macOS to speculate further - I use Paragon NTFS for Mac because I generally need to write to the drives I use. So read-only NTFS drives aren't a problem I ever have directly.


A third-party NTFS driver is something you could consider if you are using NTFS drives all the time. The big names in that space are Paragon and Tuxera (though not the only ones), plus the open source Mac-FUSE project. On Sequoia you probably have to jump through a couple of hoops in Recovery Mode to allow third party kexts to run to use any of these (my Sequoia machine is the one place I haven't installed much beyond basic Apple-provided apps).

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Oct 19, 2024 7:21 AM in response to g_wolfman

Thanks for the reply

I copied the files on my windows computer to my onedrive and letting it sync

not sure why it’s still not working (even after I formatted the drive in exact)

so now I’m just waiting for 780gig to upload then download on the Mac 😂


Thanks for the info, I’ll post if I figure it out

👊

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Oct 15, 2024 11:26 PM in response to g_wolfman

Thank you for your reply,

Source drive is NTFS

while copying from the external to my Mac. I can read and open any files but when I try and copy them to my Mac it starts to copy then stops and gives that error. Tried a different drive and the same thing.

Really confused

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Error -50 when copying files from external drive

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