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Macbook Pro late 2012 can't copy files to external hard drive

I purchased a seagate external hard drive a year ago and started moving files to the hard drive and have done so up until now. Nothing has been done to the external hard drive and I have plenty of space as I checked. The only thing that has changed is I updated to MacOS 10.13.1 two days ago. when I plugged my external hard drive I was asked if I wanted to use with time machine and I declined. I opened the external hard drive and the folder icon format is completely different and there are no columns. I see folders but no dates, no subfolders and no preview as well as I can no longer copy files and photos either. Please help. Thank you.

Posted on Nov 16, 2017 7:16 PM

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2 replies

Nov 16, 2017 8:00 PM in response to sandra.more

The external drive is likely formatted NTFS for Windows and you are running a third party app such as Paragon or Tuxera that allows you to write to the drive. Did you update the third party app when you updated your OS? The way to prevent this type of issue is to format the external drive for Mac rather than for Windows. If you format it now you will lose all the data on it unless you copy off all the data prior to reformatting.

Macbook Pro late 2012 can't copy files to external hard drive

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