Trouble with external hard drive

[jephotog]

I am new to mac and am trying to bring over lots of photographs from a number of old laptops, and PC desktop. I copied a number of photography folders onto a seagate external hard drive.

The HD was formatted for PC NTFS. I then split off the remainder of the hard drive into an ex-fat partition. I have been using Adobe Lightroom to move photos to the ex-fat partition.

The ex-fat partition is very unstable. Whenever I shut the lid all the partitions close and won't reopen until I restart the whole computer. Sometimes after restarting the ex-fat partition takes a very long time to mount. I am not sure of how long but I don't think its going to happen and then notice it's in my finder later.

How can I make this external hard drive more stable or reliable?

 

[Natzoo]

I am new to mac and am trying to bring over lots of photographs from a number of old laptops, and PC desktop. I copied a number of photography folders onto a seagate external hard drive.

The HD was formatted for PC NTFS. I then split off the remainder of the hard drive into an ex-fat partition. I have been using Adobe Lightroom to move photos to the ex-fat partition.

The ex-fat partition is very unstable. Whenever I shut the lid all the partitions close and won't reopen until I restart the whole computer. Sometimes after restarting the ex-fat partition takes a very long time to mount. I am not sure of how long but I don't think its going to happen and then notice it's in my finder later.

How can I make this external hard drive more stable or reliable?

i had a friend that switched over to mac, i think you should put all of your pc info into a backup, then go to mac and setup ur mac from a backup. tell me if i don't answer ur question

 

[jephotog]

i had a friend that switched over to mac, i think you should put all of your pc info into a backup, then go to mac and setup ur mac from a backup. tell me if i don't answer ur question

I am not sure what you mean.

I have a half dozen hard drives and backups from different PCs. I imagine I have at least a Terabyte of images to store, so I need to keep them on an external HD.

If I can figure out how to work with the variety of Hard Drives and get them onto a form of backup in mac format. I would then like to reformat the external HD to work with my mac so it is stable and reliable.

Would my seagate if reformatted to a mac format become stable or do I need to buy a mac specific hard drive?

 

[crjackson2134]

i had a friend that switched over to mac, i think you should put all of your pc info into a backup, then go to mac and setup ur mac from a backup. tell me if i don't answer ur question

Huh?

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It sounds like you are making this harder than it is.

Connect your target drive and be sure to format it to Mac OS extended journaled.

Connect your source drive (probably formatted in NTFS)

Now copy everything from the source drive to the target drive...

OS X can read NTFS drives just fine, it just doesn't write to them by default.

 

[jephotog]

It sounds like you are making this harder than it is.

Connect your target drive and be sure to format it to Mac OS extended journaled.

Connect your source drive (probably formatted in NTFS)

Now copy everything from the source drive to the target drive...

OS X can read NTFS drives just fine, it just doesn't write to them by default.

I am in a bit of a jam because I didn't realize the two Hard drives were not compatible. I downloaded a bunch of stuff on the NTSF drive and put 1.2 TB of info on it. Then created the other half of the hard drive in ex-fat.

Since I have a PC desktop I need something compatible with it as well. For now the NTSF is better recognized than the ex-fat partition.

 

[crjackson2134]

I am in a bit of a jam because I didn't realize the two Hard drives were not compatible. I downloaded a bunch of stuff on the NTSF drive and put 1.2 TB of info on it. Then created the other half of the hard drive in ex-fat.

Since I have a PC desktop I need something compatible with it as well. For now the NTSF is better recognized than the ex-fat partition.

You could go to http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ and get an NTFS driver for OS X, or a HFS+ driver for Win.

It's free to try, then buy it if it works out.

 

[sarah362]

First take a backup of complete data and format external drive with exFAT filesystem on a PC rather Mac machine. Because Mac system makes drive unreadable for other platforms after formatting drive. Once you do it then transfer the complete data onto this exFAT formatted drive.