

- #CAN YOU FORMAT A USB DRIVE ON A WINDOWS COMPUTER FOR A MAC HOW TO#
- #CAN YOU FORMAT A USB DRIVE ON A WINDOWS COMPUTER FOR A MAC FOR MAC#
Choose Disk Utility among these utilities and open it. Click on Launchpad at the dock of your Mac and choose Other in the menu. Method 1: Check if an external hard drive is NTFS file system in Disk Utility Simply, you can check this by viewing its disk information either in Disk Utility or in the Finder, and here is how.
#CAN YOU FORMAT A USB DRIVE ON A WINDOWS COMPUTER FOR A MAC HOW TO#
How to check if an external hard drive is NTFS file system on Mac? Therefore, if you find your external hard drive read-only, for example, a Seagate external hard drive shows read-only on Mac, the first thing that comes to your mind should be to check if this drive is NTFS file system. For an NTFS file system SD card on Mac, files like photos are locked as you can only read them. And when you open files on this external hard drive, you will find your documents being read-only. If you try to copy or drag files on an NTFS-formatted external hard drive on Mac, you'll be unable to but see the greyed-out no symbol as below. That's to say, you are unable to write to NTFS drives on macOS Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, and any earlier Mac operating systems. FAT32 and exFAT are usable for both Windows and Mac operating systems.

By default, Windows uses Microsoft NTFS file system while Macs use HFS+ and APFS for OS volume. There are many different kinds of file systems, and each one has different structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size, etc. Case 1: The read-only external hard drive is NTFS file systemĪ file system controls how data is stored and retrieved on a disk. Thus, this post will analyze three external hard drive read-only cases so that you can find a relevant and feasible solution to your problem. Moreover, users who use USB flash drives and SD cards on Mac also encounter this read-only problem. When you check its disk information, you will find you can only read the external hard drive on Mac. You can't write to external hard drives on Mac due to disk corruptionįor example, many people have reported that their WD My Passport external hard drives are read-only on Mac.You only have read permission to this external hard drive.The read-only external hard drive is NTFS file system.There are mainly three causes for this issue: You may be wondering why you can't write to this external hard drive even though you are the owner of this disk, and more importantly, if you can fix this read-only problem without formatting or not? But there are chances that this external hard drive shows read-only on Mac. Usually, you can read and write to files on an external hard drive on your Mac.
#CAN YOU FORMAT A USB DRIVE ON A WINDOWS COMPUTER FOR A MAC FOR MAC#
By Katrina | Posted to NTFS for Mac Tips, updated on November 19th, 2020 |Įxternal hard drives are important storage media for both Mac and Windows users.
