format external hard drive for windows on my mac to ntfs

Format External Hard Drive For Windows On My To Ntfs Software You Can

You can use the following guide to fix read-only external hard drive in Disk Utility without formatting.

Usually, you can read and write to files on an external hard drive on your Mac.

But there are chances that this external hard drive shows read-only on Mac.

For example, many people have reported that their WD My Passport external hard drives are read-only on Mac.

When you check its disk information, you will find you can only read the external hard drive on Mac.

Moreover, users who use USB flash drives and SD cards on Mac also encounter this read-only problem.

There are many different kinds of file systems, and each one has different structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size, etc.

By default, Windows uses Microsoft NTFS file system while Macs use HFS and APFS for OS volume.

FAT32 and exFAT are usable for both Windows and Mac operating systems.

If you try to copy or drag files on an NTFS-formatted external hard drive on Mac, youll be unable to but see the greyed-out no symbol as below.

For an NTFS file system SD card on Mac, files like photos are locked as you can only read them.

You will see an obvious Windows NT File System in the right column.

Try to repair the read-only external hard drive with or without formatting.

In this case, if you dont have anything important on this drive or you have a copy of a data backup, you can simply format this external hard drive without worrying about data loss.

To formatting this read-only hard drive, you can just go to Disk Utility and Erase it.

Therefore, you can choose HFS if you are going to use this external hard drive on macOS Sierra and earlier Mac operating systems.

The reason is, as you may know, formatting a hard disk will wipe your data out of this drive and cause data loss.

Format External Hard Drive For Windows On My To Ntfs Software You Can

The NTFS for Mac software you can try is iBoysoft NTFS for Mac to make the NTFS drives writable on Mac.

Meanwhile, do not use this method if you are not familiar with the command line, in case that you input a wrong command and cause unexpected damage to your Mac and drives.

Thus, if the permissions are changed by you or others, a message will pop up and inform you that the file is read-only or you dont have permission to save when you save changes to this disk.

Here below are steps to ignore the permission on external hard drives.

When this happens, your drive will be only mounted in read-only mode to prevent the data on it from corruption.

Format External Hard Drive For Windows On My Mac To Ntfs