Help connecting a WD NTFS External HDD to a Mac

By Jose_49
in Apple (macOS)

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Grand Master

Jose_49

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Posted

Hi people! I need help connecting my father?s WD my passport 1TB, NTFS format, to a Macbook pro 2011/2012 (Core i5 ? 2.4GHz).

The drive was previously formatted to NTFS when he was using his HP by the WD?s Smartware (Seriously, I don?t know why he uses that crap, even I told him that?s useless and counterproductive but he insisted using it), and all the data was encrypted by it. In other words, I need to have the Smartware on my dad?s Mac working so he can extract the files.

The thing is that when I try to install the Smartware in the Mac, it tells me that the drive needs writing capabilities and needs to be formatted completely to do the job. Obviously, this is not what I want, since I only (for the time being) want to extract the content.

I tried NTFS 3G for mounting, but it didn?t work; it threw an error, which I couldn?t read because my father closed it without reading it -_-.

My father and I tried to transfer the content using Mac?s transfer wizard, but it was taking too long and brought errors. Hell, it took one hour to pass 200mb through a direct LAN connection!

Can someone give me any suggestions?

I was, for once, considering on converting the NTFS drive to FAT32 as a last resort using Aomei (but I?m not too sure about it)

Thanks a lot for the help!

Proficient

tomasarson

Posted
Posted

sounds like you need to decrypt the hard drive before you can do anything.

converting it to fat32 wouldn't work as the data will still be encrpyted.

did you make sure the "smart"ware you installed on the mac is up to date? did you install it from a cd or dl it from their site? also, is the mac up to date?

ntfs should be plug and play on a mac as far as i'm aware.

googled it some more and found this helpful link. http://techqa.wordpr...to-ntfs-drives/

i guess a mac can read but not write to ntfs. although there are utlilies for it. most i see you have to pay for. hopefully you can google and find something free. not sure if that would make it so the wd software can write to it though.

maybe converting to fat32 would do the trick unless he has some huge files on it. fat32 doesn't handle large gb files very well. i think on windows it's around 4gb max.

one more edit lol ... http://hints.macworl...090913140023382 .. this looks like a free way to go. seems like you should def have everything backed up on the drive before trying. at least read through it to get headed in the right direction.

jk .. one more edit. http://www.tuxera.co...a-ntfs-for-mac/ free 15 day trial. http://www.paragon-s.../home/ntfs-mac/ 10 day free trial. not sure if they are full trials or limited though.

Grand Master

temple_treefrog

Posted
Posted

To the OP, use care when converting a drive from NTFS to FAT32 while the partition is encrypted.

Sometime ago I worked on a SafeBoot encrypted drive that was converted from NTFS to HFS+. After some deep troubleshooting the partition could not be decrypted and the files were not recoverable.

In your post it states that you're using NTFS-3G on Mac...

NTFS-3G Mac does not support encryption (source) and therefore Smartware on Mac will not be able to access the drive properly.

The best way to proceed (in my opinion) is to connect the drive to a Windows PC or Windows VM. Then decrypt the drive with the original application.

Fingers cross nothing is lost!

  • 4 weeks later...
Grand Master

Jose_49

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I made a workaround.

Went to grab a copy of parallels, and since it connects to the Mac drive via a network location, all of my problems have been solved. Now, I just connect the hard drive through Windows and transfer all the data needed.

Thanks a lot for the great help!

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