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I bought a Seagate external hard drive, formatted it to NTFS (Tuxera) with my iMac and backed up a few hundred GB from the iMac. But when I plug the hard drive on a Windows 7 machine, it says it could not read the drive and asked me to format it!

So now I can only use the hard drive on my Mac. Is there something wrong with how Mac formats an NTFS drive? Is there a way to fix it so I can also use it on Windows too? It is actually the reason why I formatted it to NTFS in the first place because I want to use it on both.

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  • As far as I can tell, this question isn't asking about using a drive with an Apple product. If it is somehow related to Apple hardware or software or third-party components working with Apple hardware or software, please clarify by editing the question.
    – Daniel
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 4:40
  • I've updated my question. It is a Mac question but I wouldn't mind moving it to Superuser.
    – LWZ
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 8:30

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In my experience, formats from OSX don't play nice with Windows. The other way around works fine however.

I would put the data back onto OSX and then format the drive in Windows as Fat32. Then it will work on OSX and you can copy the data onto the drive and it will still work on Windows.

Is the data in question to be used on both Windows and OSX? That seems overly hopeful....

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