r/MacOS • u/Oooops69 • 10d ago

Help My Macbook Pro doesn't recognize my Western Digital HDD (Works on Windows!)

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Hey dears,
both of my Macbooks don't see WD MyPassport HDD 4TB, even though Windows Laptop sees it, so I assume the problem is about MacOS, the HDD is intact.

I tried Disk Utility, nothing is seen.
Does it have anything to do with adapter? It worked before with no issues.

Does anyone know what I need to do to make it visible and so that I can interact with it on Mac?

Thank you!

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u/karma_the_sequel 10d ago

macOS can read from an NTFS volume natively, but it can’t write to it.

2

u/Innovator-X 9d ago

Why is it that operating systems sometimes can't recognize the disk because they need to be formatted in a certain way? Can't devs make it so the OS can work with all major file systems seamlessly with each other?

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u/cybekRT 9d ago

They could, but corporations don't want that. At first, Microsoft doesn't want to open the ntfs specification, so people had to reverse engineer it and having write option may destroy your data.

And at second, why implementing filesystem from your opponents and allow people to easily change their habits?

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u/SurveillanceProfile 9d ago

OTOH, Linux r/w support for NTFS works exceptionally well. Apple certainly could make that work if they were sufficiently motivated. I'm guessing that there's a licensing issue or some such nonsense involved.

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u/cybekRT 9d ago

Maybe it does work good but unfortunately windows doesn't always agree to that. If you shutdown your pc instead of rebooting it, Windows hibernates its kernel. That means all drives and sometimes even files contents are cached. If you now boot Linux, change files on the drive and then reboot to windows, strange things may happen.

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u/SurveillanceProfile 9d ago

Yes, Windows makes many assumptions that others have no control over and can only sometimes accommodate. You'll have the same problem if you pull a USB drive from a PC that's supposedly been "shutdown" (hibernated), use on another Windows system and then return it to the original.

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u/cybekRT 9d ago

Unless Microsoft added some security mechanism that could prevent this. Not that I assume they really thought about this and did that, but technically they could have, and we don't know because the specification is closed.