Writing to NTFS Drives

[Turboladdade]

A friend of mine has run into a bit of a snag with this el-cheapo media player thing he has, which is basically an external hard drive that can be attached to a television and play movies. It is formatted as NTFS I presume, because he cannot modify anything on it, only read it.

He is trying to get some videos onto it, but has run out of options. Will those sort of drives work if re-formatted to FAT32 or some other PC format? Or must he find a PC somewhere to modify it.

[mrkramer]

It may help if I knew exactly what one it is. but my guess is that it has some sort of software on it that would be destroyed if it were to be reformatted, so I would try to find a PC, or he could try something like this http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/. I have no clue how well that work but he could try the trial.

[pamadeus]

^ Paragon NTFS works great, I have it on my MacBook so I can alter my windows partition from OS X. I'd highly recommend it.

[Turboladdade]

Using third party stuff that screws around with fundamental functions of the computer (like reading and writing to hard drives) always makes me a little nervous. I think eventually we just found some PC somewhere and told him to deal with it.

[hank]

I've used Tuxera's NTFS without any problems for more than a year. Well worth paying for, to deal with a sneakernet transfer of huge files carried on a little Passport external USB drive.
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/