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Why Does My External Hard Drive Change From Mac To NTFS By Itself?

I would post screenshots but I am currently backing up my backup hard drive (lol) to another drive so I can reformat it. Anyway, today I plugged in my Toshiba Canivo 1TB external to do some organizing. I went to delete something (Cmd+Delete) and nothing happened. So, I tried to drag and drop it to the trash and got a message saying the file cannot be delete. That's weird, I thought. So, I open up disk utility and discover that my external hard drive decided to change itself to NTFS format on its own. I tried ejecting and reconnecting it - that didn't work. I tried rebooting - that didn't work. I thought my USB hub could possibly be an issue - nope. The only things that have changed since I last used my external is that I changed my MacBook's battery, put in an SSD, and upgraded to El Capitan. I can't see how any of those could cause this but I figured I'd mention it. Has anybody else had something similar happen? Thanks.

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Vain Rowe

Vain Rowe

Answered on Tuesday, January 27, 2026

The possible cause turns your Apple formatted drive to NTFS keeps unknown because I cannot infer any trouble from your description. If you want to use the NTFS write access software on your Mac, iBoysoft NTFS for Mac is highly recommended. It mounts your NTFS drive in read&write mode on Mac as long as you connect the NTFS drive to your device. With it, you can read/write/copy to/delete files on the NTFS-formatted drive without a hitch.

Click the Download button below to use this software on your Mac.

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iBoysoft NTFS for Mac

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You can also format the NTFS drive to the Apple file system or exFAT format on your Mac but it will erase everything on your disk, which is less recommended since you got lots of files and data on your drive.

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