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I just bought my first Mac which is a used 2018 Mac Mini with a Core i7 running Ventura 13.5.2. I plugged in an external hard drive which is formatted in NTFS; very strangely it is able to view some files on this drive but not all of them. I've been searching for this problem but haven't found anything like it.

I have verified on my Linux laptop that the files do indeed exist-- I can access them from this machine.

I'm not a Mac person so I don't really know what my options are or what makes sense to do. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks!

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  • Your post does not contain any questions. I believe you are asking for information on how to access (read and/or write) from NTFS formatted volumes. I linked your question to two similar questions that I thought would be helpful. If I am in error, then please edit your question and perhaps post a comment.
    – David Anderson
    Sep 20 at 15:21

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The problem is that it is formatted as NTFS. I have had trouble (I lost data!) as a result of using NTFS on a Mac. The best thing to do is to copy the data to another location (to your Linux laptop) and formatting it as ExFAT, which will work on MacOS, Windows, and Linux. For Linux, you will need to run this command first to let the system recognize the file system.

sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

To format the drive after you have copied the data to another location (on Linux), go into Disk Utility and then click "View" and "Show All Devices". Now select the drive (the drive itself, not the partition), and click "Erase". Select "GUID Partition Map" as Scheme, and ExFAT as Format. Now click "Erase". This WILL wipe all data on the drive, so BACK IT UP FIRST! After it finishes formatting, connect it to your laptop and copy the data back to the drive.

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