I Have an External USB hard disk (Seagate 500Gb) which came formatted as NTFS which I want to use to back up a friend's slightly creaky G4 MacBook. When I plug the drive in however, it does not appear as an icon on the Desktop.
Do Macs normally mount NTFS drives or will I need to reformat it as FAT32 for it to be picked up?
UPDATE -
- The Mac runs OS-X 10.2.3 which won't run FUSE/NTFS-3D.
- Tried formatting as FAT using the Mac Disk Utility which claimed the volume was too large.
- Tried mounting on a Windows machine and sharing the drive.
This almost worked but errors when copying some files (this turned out to be files containing illegal characters for Windows such as '\')
In the end I formatted a USB memory stick with the Mac file system and backed up to that and am sharing the drive via a Windows machine.
Answer to original question is 'Yes, Macs should mount a NTFS drive' (read-only on older OS versions I think) so there's something wrong with the Mac. Time for an OS update at the very least I think.
Answer
By default Mac OS X will mount NTFS drives read-only without any additional software. There are instances that they will not mount if the drive requires a file check because of not being properly ejected. NTFS-3G will allow you to force mount it however and allows you to write to the hard drives as well.
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