Creating new Folder to External Hard Drive

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Level 1

17 points

Creating new Folder to External Hard Drive

I've searched the forums and found many discussions on this, but I am in a quandary. I have a 4 TB Seagate external hard drive with approximately 2 TB of data backed up to it. I have been obviously saving data to that external drive with no problems.

Today, I attempted to move some data from my MacBookPro to the external drive and was unable to create a folder. Reading the forums, I checked my permissions and it now shows I have "Read Only" permissions. Additionally, it shows the drive formatted in NTFS.

How is this possible?? Everything was fine 8 weeks ago. How can I fix this?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Jul 10, 2016 8:19 AM

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Answer 1

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:23 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Reformat the drive for use on a Mac, NTFS is for Windows machines, format the drive to MacOS Extended (Journaled)

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Answer 2

Phil0124

Level 10

216,920 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:27 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Did you recently update the operating system?

Were you using an NTFS driver such as Paragon or Tuxera to enable writing to NTFS formatted drives?

OSx by default can only read from NTFS formatted drives, if you were backing up to that drive, and its formatted NTFS you must have been using a driver which is no longer working.

You may need to install one again to get back the ability to write to NTFS drives.

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Answer 3

BooberbooFL Author

Level 1

17 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:27 AM in response to Csound1

This drive was formatted by this MacBook and everything was working fine 8 weeks ago. Why/how would things change on their own to NTFS and read only??

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Answer 4

BooberbooFL Author

Level 1

17 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:29 AM in response to Phil0124

Hmmmm. Paragon seems familiar and I did run a system clean up. Perhaps Paragon was deleted. Thanks for the memory jogger. I will research further..

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Answer 5

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:30 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Did you install any software that came with the drive?

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Answer 6

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:42 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Look for Paragon NTFS

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Answer 7

BooberbooFL Author

Level 1

17 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:41 AM in response to Csound1

Found Paragon. Looked at preferences and Re-Enabled it. Rebooted laptop, but still unable to write to external drive.

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Answer 8

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,684 points

Jul 10, 2016 8:56 AM in response to BooberbooFL

You didn't answer the question about updating OS X. Mac's have never supported writing to NTFS drives (they can only read NTFS by default), which is why you need to instal Paragon's software or something like OS X Fuse with an 'NTFS-3G' plugin. This kind of setup often fails when a new OS is installed because the old software is outdated or no longer supported. Ideally you only use NTFS when you must write from a PC - the format is not frat for general Mac only use.

Did you reinstall the Paragon software or simply toggle the settings? The plugin requires some low level plugins to work, so reinstalling the latest version for your OS is often the easiest way to make it work, sometimes you need to remove the old version first, reinstall & then reboot to allow the drive to re-mount on the system.

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Answer 9

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jul 10, 2016 9:29 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Reformat the drive for use in a Mac, plugin solutions to this problem are unreliable (as you have found out)

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Answer 10

BooberbooFL Author

Level 1

17 points

Jul 10, 2016 9:33 AM in response to Drew Reece

I believe I found the problem in that the version of Paragon I had was not comaptable with El Capitan. Updated to new version, all seems to be working well.

If I had room to upload everything to my laptop and reformat, I would. But sadly this is not the case at the current time. Once I can get my hands on an additional external drive, I will do that.

Thank you all!

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Answer 11

Jul 10, 2016 9:41 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Mac OS 10.11 has substantially tightened up what extensions are loaded. Non-current and non-signed extensions are ignored, and not loaded. (there is a message in the console log, but most regular folks never check there). Some Users discovered that an update to their drivers to get the 10.11 compatible version was required.

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Answer 12

Jul 10, 2016 9:43 AM in response to Csound1

+1

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Answer 13

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jul 10, 2016 9:46 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Next time it happens (because it will) you'll know what to do.

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Answer 14

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,684 points

Jul 10, 2016 10:14 AM in response to BooberbooFL

Just check a new external disk is formatted as Mac OS Extended too if you move it over 🙂 Disk Utility will do that for you.

NTFS does work via the plugins but I think it eventually fails & since OS X is not able to fix issues you end up needing a Windows system to repair or recover. Personally I don't rely on it for an only copy of important Mac files.

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Answer 15

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jul 10, 2016 10:15 AM in response to Drew Reece

+1

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