Paragon NTFS Crack is also helpful to manage all kind of NTFS drives efficiently. You have to use this software to enhance the performance of your laptop, PC, and Mac hard drives.
So, you just bought an external hard drive and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive.
That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. Apple Mac machines support a different file system.
In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set.
Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like Data Rescue to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary.
Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine – a 2TB Seagate Expansion. I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I’ll also show you how to do that below.
Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS
During the last several years, I’ve used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others.
Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see those High Sierra issues I encountered).
When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this.
When I opened it, the default content was all there. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”.
It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac.
I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. It showed this format:
Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS)
What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here; you can read more on Wikipedia. The problem is that on macOS, you can’t work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app Paragon NTFS for Mac.
How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)?
Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5. They might be different if your Mac has a different version.
Step 1: Open Disk Utility.
The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
Step 2: Highlight your external drive and click “Erase”.
Make sure your drive is connected. It should show up on the left panel under “External”. Select that disk and click the “Erase” button, the one highlighted in red in the screenshot below.
Step 3: Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in Format.
A new window will pop up asking which file system you’d like to format the external drive to. By default, it’s the Windows NT File System (NTFS). Select the one shown below.
Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select “ExFAT”. Learn more about the differences between these file systems from this thread.
By the way, you can also rename your external drive.
Step 4: Wait until the erasing process is complete.
For me, it took less than a minute to format my 2TB Seagate Expansion.
You can also check to see if the format was successful. Right-click on the icon for your external drive on Mac desktop, then select “Get Info”. Under “Format”, you should see text like this:
Congratulations! Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want.
How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac
If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Highlight your drive and click “Partition” in Disk Utility.
Open the Disk Utility app and highlight your external hard drive. Make sure you select the disk icon right under “External”. If you select the one below it, the Partition option will be greyed out and become unclickable.
Step 2: Add partitions and allocate volume for each one.
After clicking “Partition”, you’ll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add “+” button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition. You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around.
After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it.
Step 3: Confirm your operation.
Once you hit “Apply”, a new window pops up asking for your confirmation. Take a few seconds to read the text description to make sure it reflects what you intend to do, then click the “Partition” button to continue.
Step 4: Wait until it says “Operation successful.”
To check whether the operation is really successful, go to your Mac desktop. You should see multiple disk icons show up. I chose to create two partitions on my Seagate Expansion — one for backup, the other for personal use. You can find more info in this post: How to Backup Mac to an External Hard Drive.
That wraps up this tutorial article. I hope you find it helpful. As always, let me know if you have any issues during the formatting or partitioning process.
Mac OS X supports a handful of common file systems—HFS+, FAT32, and exFAT, with read-only support for NTFS. It can do this because the file systems are supported by the OS X kernel. Formats such as Ext3 for Linux systems are not readable, and NTFS can’t be written to. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasions when you’d want to use one of them. With FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) you can.
FUSE mimics the kernel’s handling of file systems and allows OS X to both interact with unsupported formats and use many other storage routines, some of which are rather creative. With FUSE, such formats can be handled very similarly to natively supported file systems and allow you to interact with drives your Mac otherwise could not read to or write from. Here’s how you can put FUSE to work.
What is FUSE?
FUSE works by providing a behind-the-scenes interface between Apple’s storage routines and specially programmed modules that you install on your Mac. These modules can read various storage formats, and then, with FUSE’s help, can be mounted and accessed as a drive-like storage medium. For instance, if you have several cloud-based storage accounts, you can write a small module that will connect all of these services with FUSE. You can then mount them as a single volume on the system, much like you’d plugged in a USB drive.
FUSE has its limitations, however. File system access performs less well than with native kernel support, for example. On the other hand it offers vast flexibility in storage options. For instance, in addition to using multiple Web storage services as a single drive, FUSE modules have been written to use PNG image files for storing drive data. In this case a mounted storage device’s data will be spread out among a number of garbled PNG images (a perhaps amusing, but frankly bizarre, way to manage your files).
These approaches are experimental and fun, but FUSE does have useful options that allow you to expand your Mac’s file system support beyond the natively supported formats, including allowing access to Ext3 drives, full NTFS support, and even letting you mount SFTP shares as local drives.
To get started, download and install FUSE for OS X. Once installed, you can install the desired module for the various file systems you would like to manage on your Mac. Keep in mind that some modules are well tested and regularly used, while others might not be. And some are more integrated in OS X while others will require Terminal commands to mount their file systems.
FUSE and NTFS
For NTFS support, one of the more popular FUSE modules is NTFS-3G, an open-source package from Tuxera. To acquire it you have several options. You can download an older precompiled version of NTFS-3G. The more technically inclined can download and compile the latest source code either directly from Tuxera or by using a package manager like MacPorts or Fink.
Once installed, an attached NTFS drive should be automatically recognized and mounted using NTFS-3G and FUSE. In addition, you should be able to format drives as NTFS using Disk Utility.
Using Ext3
For Linux Ext2 and Ext3 file systems, you can use the fuse-ext2 module, and then mount Ext2 and Ext3 drives using Terminal (automatic mounting and managing in Disk Utility is not yet supported). Follow these steps:
1. Install the ext2 FUSE module.
2. Enable Disk Utility’s Debug menu, using the following command in Terminal, followed by opening Disk Utility and choosing the option in the Debug menu to show all partitions:
defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1
3. Attach your ext2/ext3 drive and when it appears in Disk Utility (grayed out), select the volume and press Command-I to produce its Information window. In this window note the device name, which should be something like “disk2s2,” or “disk3s2.”
4. Create a new folder somewhere in your user account to use as a mount point for the drive (I recommend a folder called “mount” directly in your home folder).
5. Mount the drive using the following Terminal command syntax, replacing the device name and mount path with that of your disk and the path to the mount folder you created:
fuse-ext2 /dev/disk2s2 /Volumes/mountpoint
This will mount the drive as read-only, but you can use the “-o force” flag in the following manner to implement write support:
fuse-ext2 -o force /dev/disk2s2 /Volumes/mountpoint
After performing these steps, the ext2/ext3 drive will be fully accessible from the folder you created and specified to use as the mount point.
Using SSHFS
In addition to supporting locally attached drives, FUSE can be used to access remote systems and mount their shared resources locally. Granted, you can do this with SMB and AFP protocols when you have enabled File Sharing on a remote Mac, but since enabling SSH with the Remote Login service also enables SFTP access, you can use the SSHFS module for FUSE to access your Mac’s files directly over the encrypted SFTP connection.
1. Download and install the SSHFS module (available from the FUSE for OS X page).
2. As with managing Ext2 and Ext3 drives, create a folder on your Mac to use as a mount point
3. In Terminal, run a command similar to the following to access a folder on the remote system and mount it at the folder you created:
sshfs username@hostname:/remote/directory/path /local/mount/point
In this command,
/remote/directory/path
is the path to the desired folder on the remote server that you have access to. (Alternatively, you can just use a forward slash to mount the root directory.) The /local/mount/point
is the full path on your current system to the new mount folder. For example, if you want to mount the entire root file system from the remote computer at a folder called “mount” in your home directory, then you would run a command similar to the following:sshfs username@hostname:/ ~/mount
While these approaches with FUSE can be used to mount various file system formats, for the most part, you will not need special approaches for handling hard drives and other storage media. The built-in support in OS X is enough for most uses, but there are some special cases where the storage management options offered by FUSE can be useful.
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