Mac OSX Leopard External Drive Problem

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pezking

New member
I've just got my new Macbook, it's all working fine and I'm really happy with it... Except...

When I plug one of my external drives into the USB port, it doesn't appear on the desktop. I can find it in Disk Utility, but can't "Verify Disk" or "Repair Disk". The drive works absolutely fine on my Windows partition (using Boot Camp).

I thought it could be a problem with my drive, so I used another drive which is both USB and Firewire and it worked fine on both.

Incidentally if I boot from the Mac OSX installation disk (as suggested by Disk Utility) I am able to "Verify Disk" and it recognizes the drive and size/number of files etc.

Any thoughts on how to rectify this? If it makes much difference, the hard drive is a 320GB Seagate Freeagent Desktop.

Thanks in advance
 
This is lame! A phone call to AppleCare in the morning me thinks.

I would try formatting to HFS+ instead, but I want to keep my drive in NTFS for ease of compatibility. I'm sure this hard drive worked fine on my friend's Macbook running Tiger...

Until I can get it working, I'm gonna have to copy files from my hard drive to my Mac partition using the Windows partition! A slow workaround...
 
OK after some messing around, I've come to the conclusion that the Macbook just wont read NTFS volumes. I am aware that it doesn't support writing natively but I was sure it still read the drives...

Any ideas?
 
pezking said:
OK after some messing around, I've come to the conclusion that the Macbook just wont read NTFS volumes. I am aware that it doesn't support writing natively but I was sure it still read the drives...

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Mine reads an external USB2.0/FW400 drive formatted with NTFS just fine...
 
pezking said:
OK after some messing around, I've come to the conclusion that the Macbook just wont read NTFS volumes. I am aware that it doesn't support writing natively but I was sure it still read the drives...
Click to expand...

It should support reading NTFS just fine. Try hooking it up to a Windows machine and doing a scandisk or equivalent.
 
Well it wouldn't let them mount at all. I've downloaded a trial version of Paragon NTFS and it works fine now. Perhaps I'll buy the software...

Still haven't phoned Applecare, will try it Monday morning I guess
 
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