copying movies to an external hard drive

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I have a couple of downloaded movies to copy on to a portable hard drive that I use through a Western Digital media converter to subsequently watch on the TV. I`ve tried to drag and drop the movies from the downloads folder on the Mac into my hard drive via the usb connection but it won`t let me do it. it was that simple on the old PC, but doesn`t seem to work on Mac.
Can anyone help please?
cheers
Andy
 

RavingMac

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16Gb Mac Mini 2018, 15" MacBook Pro 2012 1 TB SSD
How is the HD formatted?
If you didn't reformat it after using with your PC, it is probably formatted NTFS, and if so, your Mac will be able to read from, but not write to, the HD without using a 3rd party driver (Paragon software sells one, though there are free alternatives).
 
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Hmmm great. copied all 390gb worth onto mac, formatted hdd to fat, copied everything back, now western media digital converter wont read drive!!! When formatting the drive I did notice it came up as exFat and not FAT32. Would this make a difference? Currently copying back and formatting again back to ntfs so looks like I`ll have to keep a drive or flash drive just to copy from mac to pc in order to watch the films!!
 

RavingMac

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I don't use it because I no longer have PCs in the house, but a lot of users say the Paragon NTFS driver is a good choice. With it on your Mac you will have both read and write access on your external.
 
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I don't use it because I no longer have PCs in the house, but a lot of users say the Paragon NTFS driver is a good choice. With it on your Mac you will have both read and write access on your external.

Thanks very much for the info. reformatted the drive back to ntfs, installed paragon ntfs driver , copied everything over and now able to access films via media converter again.
Cheers
Andy
 

RavingMac

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Glad to see things worked out well. :)
 

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