External Hard drive mounting issue with OS X?

[cheez]

I have a new MacBook pro with OS X Lion. This is my first Mac computer.

I have a 3TB external hard drive that I've been using for my Windows PC's. It's in NTFS format.

Well when I plugged it in on my MacBook it pops up an error message saying something about the external hard drive could not be mounted due to error.

Well so i installed NTFS-3G. It did nothing. The problem it can't mount the drive. Installing this app did not resolve... I then tried the MacFUSE... samething, no go.

I searched the web and there are others who had this problem as well. Is this problem *common* for getting the external drive to work with Mac? 😉 Did you run into this problem? What did you do to fix? Magic pls!!!😳

p.s. in disk utilities it sees the external drive. I just can't access it due to mounting error.


thanks,

 

[GWestphal]

OS X will mount NTFS just fine in read only mode, so there must be something amiss. What does the error say? If nothing useful, check the Console out put when you plug it in. Open Spotlight and type Console. If you let us know what that says we might be able to point you in the right direction.

Does it still mount fine on Windows?

 

[Eug]

How did you format it? Just a standard Windows NTFS format or did you use some 3rd party application to play with the partition or something?

Also, would exFAT work for you? It works on Windows 7 and OS X Lion, both natively - no 3rd party drivers - for full read/write access.

 

[dawks]

How did you format it? Just a standard Windows NTFS format or did you use some 3rd party application to play with the partition or something?

Also, would exFAT work for you? It works on Windows 7 and OS X Lion, both natively - no 3rd party drivers - for full read/write access.

Yup, for full stable read/write support you'll want FAT32 or exFAT.. exFAT supports large volumes and files bigger than 4gigs. I found with OS 10.6 I had to format my drive with Windows 7, at the command line. The Mac format in Disk Utility couldn't be read by Windows 7.

And yea, OSX can mount NTFS drives fine, NTFS-3G is only if you need to write to an NTFS drive (I found it to be unstable and slow when I tried I back in 2009). exFAT works perfect though.

 

[cheez]

Update:

I also could not see and read the drive via network when this external HDD was connected to my Windows PC. But I can access other drives (PC's hard drives) just fine from MacBook. I am guessing this is related with mounting error? 😕

Strangely, just yesterday it started working. I am now able to see / access the drive via network. What da hell happened. :ninja: Did Mac get updated on its own or something? I didn't do nothin.

No I haven't taken the drive and tried plug it back to my MacBook. I will try it tonight. I wonder that famous mounting error will come up again. :twisted:

OS X will mount NTFS just fine in read only mode, so there must be something amiss. What does the error say? If nothing useful, check the Console out put when you plug it in. Open Spotlight and type Console. If you let us know what that says we might be able to point you in the right direction.

Does it still mount fine on Windows?

Yes the external HDD mounts fine on my Windows PC's. I plug it back to my MacBook and I got the mounting error. I don't have the full description of the error as I don't know how to take screenshot with Mac OS.😳

How did you format it? Just a standard Windows NTFS format or did you use some 3rd party application to play with the partition or something?

It was formatted in NTFS format from Windows server 2003 PC. Works fine with Windows XP and Server 2003 machines. No third party stuff.

Also, would exFAT work for you? It works on Windows 7 and OS X Lion, both natively - no 3rd party drivers - for full read/write access.

Yup, for full stable read/write support you'll want FAT32 or exFAT.. exFAT supports large volumes and files bigger than 4gigs. I found with OS 10.6 I had to format my drive with Windows 7, at the command line. The Mac format in Disk Utility couldn't be read by Windows 7.

Thanks for the info guys. I will keep that in mind. Can exFat be read by Windows XP / Server 2003 as well? Cause that's what I have.

NTFS-3G (I found it to be unstable and slow when I tried I back in 2009). exFAT works perfect though.

Thanks for the info. exFat should work with Server 2003 and XP right?

 

[Tyranicus]

Thanks for the info. exFat should work with Server 2003 and XP right?

With a driver installed, it does. There is no exFAT support by default though.

 

[cheez]

With a driver installed, it does. There is no exFAT support by default though.

Wow thanks for the info.

The exFAT file system driver incorporates the following advanced structures to improve performance:
* A cluster bitmap for fast allocation
* A per-file contiguous bit for fast file access
* Better contiguous on-disk layout (useful for recording movies)
* Support for Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) time stamps

This is good to hear. It offers better performance than the NTFS file system. Wee Wee ^_^