does a mac see NTFS???

liquidmonkey

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a friend of mine wants to buy one of my external WD my books (500gig). he has a MAC laptop and i'm just wondering if the mac laptop will recognize the WD HDD and its NTFS file system???????

it will hook up with either USB or firewire.
 
a friend of mine wants to buy one of my external WD my books (500gig). he has a MAC laptop and i'm just wondering if the mac laptop will recognize the WD HDD and its NTFS file system???????

it will hook up with either USB or firewire.

there's a pretty easy way to find out, though IIRC a MAC can read NTFS files, but just not write them or something like that...
 
Mac OS can only read NTFS.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/post102141-2.html

To summarize, OS X Default filesystem is HFS+ and you will want to use that for your main partitions. There are pieces of software out there that insist on being installed onto an HFS+ partition.

OS X will read NTFS. Won't write to it. Why? Most likely because of the security model... a Mac would need to be aware of the NT filesystem and permissions structure in order to effecitvely read and write to the disk. That is not easy to do, as how would a Mac predict both NT Workstation and Domain permissions when it is not "active"?

What I would do is get your mac, and then setup a small network to offload the data onto a different disk drive, or to CD-ROM / DVD Rom. Then again, if this is your only copy of the data, you do realize you are begging for hard disk failure and the collapse of it all.
 
thanks!! ok, so a MAC can READ the file system which is good enough.
and the reason why i can't format it is because i only have a PC and yes, my mac friend could format it but then he would loose all the HD movies i'm sending him.
 
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