Can't write to external hard drive. I have an NTFS driver.

I'll offer some advice. Do not rely on 3rd-party software for filesystem drivers. An alternative is to use exFAT. It is readiable and writable with the native OS X and is a WIndows filesystem. It will handle all the files NTFS does. (It does not have the 4 GB file limit of FAT32.) Format a new drive as exFAT on the PC.

You would need to purchase another external HD to copy to the data but then you can use that drive as a backup for your data. It sounds like you have only one copy of your externally stored data which is dangerous. Should that drive fail, poof, your data is gone.

Jotsy wrote:

Does anybody have any ideas on how to deal with this?

Yes, HD are cheap as dirt, buy another HD and format it for your Mac (Mac OSX ext. Journaled)

OR for both PC and Mac in EXFAT format.

Jotsy wrote:

i would rather not reformat the disk as it has roughly +500GB of work that i have no other place to store temporarily.

Leave it as it is,

$65 for a 1TB HD, or $100 for a 2TB drive. you always need minimum 2 ext. HD for data redundancy protection anyway.

I had the exact same problem when I first got my Mac and wanted to use my Seagate hard drive for my Time Machine. What I had to do was to format it to do so. It's easy to do this yourself.

If you go to Spotlight Search on the top right of your toolbar (looks like a magnifying glass) and type in Disk Utility, you will see in the list "Disk Utility" highlighted, either as a Top Hit or an Application. Choose one of these to open the Disk Utility. In the window that opens, you will then see your Mac HDD listed, along with the hard drive you want to use as your Time Machine. You will see the name of the your external hard drive listed twice. Single click on the lower one. To the right, you will then see three tabs - "First Aid", "Erase" and "Restore". Choose "Erase". In the Format option that you will then see half way down the window, choose Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted). Then click the Erase option. This option formats the hard disk for use with Mac or Windows which will give you greater flexibility shuld you need to ever use it on a Wondows machine.

If that drive you can't write to is USB Bus powered that is probably part if not all of the reason you can't write to it. It isn't getting enough power from ony one USB port.

I recently had this problem, i use the Tuxera extension, what I did was I connected the NTFS hard drive to a windows computer and (to make sure it was still working properly) I copied a file from the windows pc into the drive. Then I disconnected it and plugged it back to my macbook pro currently running mavericks and It was Read/Write once again, I'm now able to copy into the NTFS drive from my macbook.