# External Harddrive wont work on mac



## canada391 (Mar 16, 2011)

Well, First off, I am not too bright when it comes to using computers, I have a bit of a short fuse with technology. I have always used a PC in the past. Just recently I switched to Mac. I want to use my external hard drive with my mac but am running into some problems.

The hard drive does show up on the desktop and I can open the folder. however, some stuff used to show up, ie. some folders, some with stuff in them, others just showed up blank. I went to use the hard drive today, and when I open the Hard drive the folder is empty. It does show that 600 gb are used up, but still nothing there! it says the folder is empty!

When I went back to my PC everything was on this hard drive, and yet it still does not show anything (pictures, movies, music etc.) on the mac.

I am getting quite frustrated, hopefully someone can help!
Thank you very much, Nathan


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

You just switched to Mac, but are using a PowerBook? Those are rather old. Nice if you have been using Macs for a long time, and still have software for them, but not the best for new Mac users. This is because they are not able to run the current software, and most companies are dropping G4s from supported CPU lists. If I were to wager a guess, your hard drive is a newer one, USB2, and over 200Gb in size, formatted in NTFS. Also, the PowerBook isn't running above 10.3 is it? These added up could be the cause of your issues. Macs and large NTFS drives don't always work together well. They can't write to them at all, just read, plus older Macs had issues with large drives and USB2, especially if the Mac doesn't have USB2 to begin with. If possible, take your hard drive to a local Apple store and plug it into a new Mac and see if it still does it. If so, then there is something funky with the hard drive, like it's using special software in Windows. If not, then I'd upgrade to the newest OS that the PowerBook supports. We'd need to know which model it is to tell you the version to find on ebay.


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