Your Mac does not recognize USB or external HDD? That is because your Mac does not support reading and writing on NTFS Flash Drive yet (not really?). Look at the solution to enable NTFS read and write support in Mac OS X El Capitan (and older).
It comes to very quickly and easy solutions to recognize, read and write NTFS Partitions on Mac, no matter which OS X (El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks or older OS X versions - This solution works 100% in OS X El Capitan).
We do not talk about why Mac OS X does not support full NTFS itself or why this feature is hidden from Mac OS X. We absolutely can use Terminal command to manually enable NTFS write support.
Let’s see how it works.
- Run Terminal: Applications > Utilities > Terminal
- Type: sudo nano /etc/fstab
- Fill you password
- You now are brought to a program called nano and it’s the text editor that’s built into Terminal. The file that you’ll edit is called fstab (/etc/fstab).
Within nano type:
LABEL=DRIVE_NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse
Notice: DRIVE_NAME is the name of the NTFS Flash/External drive. The drive’s name should contain no spaces, as adding a space to the configuration file would tell your Mac to interpret whatever’s after that space as a separate command. If your DRIVE_NAME is made up of two words separated with a space, for example, “NO NAME”, you have to add a “\” before the space for the system to recognize the space. For example, “NO\ NAME” (for the best result, change the name of your NTFS Flash/External Drive to a new name "without space" - use PC with Microsoft Windows, of course).
Finally, just press Control-O to save the fstab file, and Control-X to exit nano.
See the result:
Final notice: this solution works perfectly on my MacBook Pro 13 Late 2013 with LACIE external 1TB HDD (in NTFS format).
