I have a Macbook Pro running Sierra with three USB external hard drives. I have my iTunes library one one of them. This one I formated in NTFS because I thought I would carry it around sometimes, turns out it's always home. No problems until last week when I copied a few mp3 files onto its root folder and dragged them into iTunes (a folder within that hard drive), I got "Attempting to copy to the disk (name) failed. An unknow error occurred (-1401). If I copy those files to another external HDD then to iTunes, same outcome. But if I drag them from the Macintosh HDD, they copy fine. The main concern now is that some mp3 files are gone from the iPhone after syncing, greyed out and when trying to play them "Item Not Available. This item can't be played". Those missing tracks show with dotted circles when viewing iPhone contents on iTunes. Lastly, when I sync, those tracks will not copy over and final message is "iTunes could not copy (name of any of the troubled tracks) to the iPhone because an unknown error occurred (-1401). I ran a Repair on Disk Utility and it went fine, though I read DU won't actually do anything on an NTFS formatted drive. I read about -1401 and some mention permissions issues. I can't edit permissions via Get Info because it is NTFS, so the lock to edit doesn't show up. The external HDD drive's sharing & permissions show up as "custom access". I have a backup of this HDD drive on a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive, this includes my entire iTunes library, I use a daily automated task on Carbon Copy Cloner to this end. So the only thing I can think of is to erase the HDD drive containing my iTunes library, reformat it from NTFS to Mac OS Extended (Master Boot Record), copy all contents from the backup onto it, and hope that this error will be fixed. Can you think of prior steps to take doing this? Thanks for reading and I apologize for the long message, wanted to make sure I gave as much info as possible.
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Error -1401 in iTunes
- Thread starter johannarg
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I reformatted the drive to OS Journaled and the problem was solved, at least until today. When dragging files to iTunes, got this message again. I googled but there are no hits with this error. Anyone else experienced this issue and found a solution? It's pretty frustrating.
Have have a MacBook Pro and also have my iTunes library on a 8tb NTFS drive. I have moved my library a few times always to an NTFS drive. I recently moved my iTunes to my Mac Mini but left the library on the same drive was issue free for about a month. Then I upgraded from paragon the free version that comes with all seagate drives to 15 like you. I’m thinking this might be where the issue might be. Have you fixed the -1401 error yet?
I have confirmed with my issue it was the paragon 15 I rolled back to 11.3(free Seagate version) I am going to try 14 next, cause I can't edit the drive in Sierra. But uninstalling 15 was no easy task i had to manually delete a bunch of files. https://www.cultofmac.com/90060/how-to-completely-uninstall-software-under-mac-os-x-macrx/
I know the link is from another site but it worked. I just finished my first sync in 2 weeks.
I know the link is from another site but it worked. I just finished my first sync in 2 weeks.
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Hello johannarg,
I, too, have an iTunes library on an external NTFS drive and I also use Paragon 14.
I have the same problem, I can not synchronize music, sounds. And it all started with an upgrade to macOS Sierra 10.12
Did you manage to overcome the error -1401?
Hi murasty, the way I solved this was by reformatting the drive, this time to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I had a backup so simply restored after reformatting. No 1401 related problem ever since. Hope this helps.