My external hard drive changed its format from Mac to NTFS by itself. Has anybody else experienced this?

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My external hard drive changed its format from Mac to NTFS by itself. Has anybody else experienced this?

I would post screenshots but I am currently backing up my backup hard drive (lol) to another drive so I can reformat it. Anyway, today I plugged in my Toshiba Canivo 1TB external to do some organizing. I went to delete something (Cmd+Delete) and nothing happened. So, I tried to drag and drop it to the trash and got a message saying the file cannot be delete. That's weird, I thought. So, I open up disk utility and discover that my external hard drive decided to change itself to NTFS format on its own. I tried ejecting and reconnecting it - that didn't work. I tried rebooting - that didn't work. I thought my USB hub could possibly be an issue - nope. The only things that have changed since I last used my external is that I changed my MacBook's battery, put in an SSD, and upgraded to El Capitan. I can't see how any of those could cause this but I figured I'd mention it. Has anybody else had something similar happen? Thanks.

MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), 250GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO

Posted on Jan 16, 2016 12:33 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 16, 2016 12:38 PM in response to joey_pugs

The drive did not reformat itself to NTFS. If the drive was reformatted all your data would be gone. I suspect that before you upgraded to El Capitan you were running some third party app that allowed you to use the NTFS formatted drive. After you upgraded to El Capitan the app is no longer compatible with your new operating system. You need to download and install an upgraded version of your app that supports El Capitan. Or, you can copy off all your data from the drive and then reformat it for your Mac.

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Answer 2

joey_pugs Author

Level 1

6 points

Jan 16, 2016 1:00 PM in response to BobTheFisherman

Thanks for the reply. That's weird - I had formatted the drive to Mac when I first got it and never used any third-party software. When I would look at it in disk utility it would say Mac OS X Extended just like my internal and then today it says NTFS. Do you know of any programs that could help me with this situation? I'm transferring everything on my external over to a Windows computer now and I'm not sure how I'm going to transfer everything back once I format it.

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Answer 3

Jan 16, 2016 1:15 PM in response to joey_pugs

Two you might check out are Tuxera NTFS and Paragon NTFS. I have no idea if these products have updates that support El Capitan.

If you want to use your external drive on both the Windows and Mac computer interchangeably, format the drive using the Windows computer to ExFat. ExFat is supported by both OSX and Windows. If you choose to reformat the drive all data on the drive will be destroyed. So off load your data before doing a format.

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