Mac reading NTFS hard drives

**lightshow** · 03-26-2006, 06:48 PM

I have an external NTFS formatted hard drive that has some raw video in it.

I want to take it to the Mac lab and use final cut pro to edit some footage.

My question is can the Mac correctly read and write to a NTFS formatted hard drive?

The Macs in the lab are eqipped with the latest home Mac OS (sorry I don't follow Mac software so I don't know what version it exactly is)

**Appzalien** · 03-27-2006, 02:26 AM

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Oper..._21282511.html

Here someone asked the same question with varying answers below.

**twisterX** · 03-27-2006, 02:37 AM

I dont know if they could write to it but i know they could read. I have mac installed on a HFS formatted and my NTFS also shows up but it cant write. Maybe it could be it doesn't on mine.

**Nickthestick91** · 03-27-2006, 02:45 AM

I dual boot XP and OSX, and my Mac can read the NTFS drive, but not write to it.

**twisterX** · 03-27-2006, 09:25 PM

Yea same here

**lightshow** · 03-27-2006, 09:43 PM

Ah thanks.

Too bad though. My second thought was to look into partitioning it into both a fat32 and ntfs but that makes no sense for what i'm doing.

I need ntfs to handle my large (16+ gb) files. Too bad.. No Final Cut Pro for me.

**twisterX** · 03-28-2006, 01:18 AM

You could transfer the files to the HFS+ HDD from the NTFS one. It will take some time but you could do it overnight.

**Wolfmight** · 03-30-2006, 04:49 AM

You can use send files from HFS+ format drives in macintosh to NTFS format drives in Windows using a network share.
What gets me is, if this method works...how come you can't copy directly from HFS+ to NTFS in the first place!? WTF???

Hopefuly there might be some special software that makes macintosh believe your external drive is a shared folder on a network. Check into OSX Emulation software.

I also have a big external drive for video footage and I currently use a 5gb Fat32 partition on it to copy from from the mac to my pc.
Havn't had to transfer anything over 4gb yet, but I can still slice the projects I guess. Doesn't sound pretty to me though.