Want to use NTFS portable hard drive with movies on Mac, how?

So I just bought my first MacBook Pro and I’ve always wanted one so I was stoked my problem is I have a Portable hard drive with Movies formatted for a Windows PC. My question is, is there any way to view these movies on my new MacBook? Is there a way to convert them without totally reformatting the hard drive and losing everything? I work on a tugboat in Alaska and I’m gonna be gone for five months so other than reading this will be my main source of entertainment. I leave in about four days and I don’t know much about computers PC or Macs. Any help would be much appreciated.

Best Answered by

Amanda Wong

Answered on Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Yes, there are two ways to make the portable hard drive with movies work with your Mac. You can remove the movies to your Windows PC or another storage media, and format the NTFS drive to make it compatible with both Mac and PC, then transfer the movies back to the formatted drive. BootCamp Assistant can also install Windows to let you access the NTFS drive on Mac. Or, you can easily use an NTFS for Mac to directly access the NTFS drive on Mac without any limitations.

This is a very common issue for computer users when they switch from Windows to macOS, how to make their external hard drives used for Windows to be compatible with Mac and have no data loss? NTFS file system is only supported by Windows, if you connect it to a Mac, you can only read but not write data to it. Before macOS Ventura, users can enable NTFS support via macOS Terminal, but Apple ceased it on macOS Ventura.

The easiest way to access NTFS drives on Mac in read-and-write mode is by utilizing an NTFS driver such as iBoysoft NTFS for Mac. With such software installed, you can directly view the contents on the NTFS drive and add, delete, edit, and move files on the drive without any limitations.

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Besides, you can use Bootcamp Assistant to partition the drive and install Windows on one partition, so that you can boot your Mac into Windows and use the NTFS drive.

The final method is a little complicated, you can move all the movies from the portable hard drive and format the drive as FAT32 or exFAT, these two files system are supported by both Windows and macOS, then move back the files to the portable hard drive, and insert the drive to Mac, you should be able to see the movies on the drive.

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