Tech guru’s i need you’re sage advice (“serves you right for buying a mac” notwithstanding).

Basically I’ve got hundreds of GB’s of stuff languishing in an unreadable format (NTFS formatted hard drive and i’m using a Macbook pro). I believe there are ways round this ( i have Googled it). Any hints or tips from someone who has been successful in such an endeavour?

Thanks in advance, Al.

Ntfs volumes are readable by all Macs with reasonably up to date versions of OS X.

Just plug it in.

Rachel

As per, Rachel.

Reading NTFS is fine, it’s writing to that you’ll need something like ParagonNTFS.

my Macbook was bought today so bang up to date?

I can’t see the hard drive, do i need to enable anything?

Al

No need to enable anything.

What sort of drive is it? I assume it’s an external. If it’s a desktop 3.5″ drive, is it powered up? If it’s USB powered, like a 2’5″ SATA/SSD, then it might be the cable?

Bottom line is, Macs will read NTFS.

NTFS:

This is the current preferred file system of Windows (beginning predominance circa Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, and including Windows XP). Most Windows systems use principle partitions with this file system. This is a journalled file system with good support for large files. It should be noted that it does NOT support POSIX permissions or ownership. Mac OS X has read only support for this format. It has no capabilities to write to an NTFS drive. Windows has complete read/write capabilities for this format.

http://guides.macrumors.com/File_systems#NTFS

you should be adle to read but not write to the ntfs partitions on the mac. Have a look in finder / preferences to see if your devices are checked under the sidebar tab.

Also have a look at utilities / disk utility to see if the drive appears there.

Paragon did a trial and you can activate it once you buy it via a key.

@wee-al – are you sure the old drive is working ? As above it should just work.

Whilst you are at it spend £50 on an 1TB usb external drive (eg Samsung M3) format it in “OS Journal extended” via Mac Disk Utilities and use that as your Time Machine backup including all these old files.

As people have said, reading NTFS should not be an issue at all. The problem will be writing to an NTFS drive. I use the macports version of ntfs-3g (because I am cheap), but it has a big problem with write speed. Other options are available and I would seriously consider buying one if I was doing a lot of Windows to Mac and back data writing.

@Willard

I use ParagonNTFS and I can confirm it’s fast as a greased whippet.

Can get it for a £11 via Amazon.