NEW MacBook Air will not write to External Harddrive

Hey!

Mostly, Your External Hard disk is not formatted in the correct file system.

To check that, Connect your external drive, then Press the "COMMAND" key and the "SPACE BAR" at the same time to open spotlight search.

Then in the search box, the in "Disk Utility" and double-click Disk Utility.

Select the external hard drive from the list of drives, under the hard drive name, It will show which File system the drive is formatted in. If it is NTFS ( Or any other which is not supported my MacOS ), then it will not work with your Mac.

You will have to re-format your drive. To do so, follow these steps:

WARNING: You will lose all data if you format your drive. Backup any important information before continuing.

1. If you have any files you want to save, copy them to another storage device.
2. Open the Disk Utility app  on your Mac using one of the following methods, depending on the type of disk or volume you want to erase:

• • If you want to erase your startup disk or startup volume: Start up from macOS Recovery, then choose Disk Utility from the macOS Utilities window.
  • If you want to erase any other type of disk or volume: Double-click Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

1. Choose View > Show All Devices.
2. In the sidebar, select the storage device you want to erase, then click the Erase button .
3. Click the Scheme pop-up menu, then choose GUID Partition Map.
4. Click the Format pop-up menu, then choose a EXFAT if you want to use it with Windows and Mac or choose MACOS EXTENDED if you want to use it with Mac only.
5. Enter a name.
6. Click ERASE.
7. This will take some time. After it is done, you should be able to write to your external drive.

More help: https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/erase-and-reformat-a-storage-device-dskutl14079/mac

https://support.apple.com/guide/disk-utility/file-system-formats-available-in-disk-utility-dsku19ed921c/19.0/mac/10.15

Hope this helped.

Are you saying that you only have Windows installed? Any Mac comes with mac OS installed (that is usually why you get a mac so you can use Mac OS). Did you use Bootcamp to install Windows or exactly how did you install it?

And, Mac OS cannot write to NTFS - it can only read.

So you will need to let us know exactly what you have on your new Mac - partitions with Mac OS, Windows or ??

If you have a separate partition for Windows and are booted from that, you should be able to read/write to NTFS as far as I know.

Since this appears to be all about Windows, it may be best to have your question in a Windows forum where people who run MS hang out; please take a look at the link and let us know if you'd like it moved.

That can be done very quickly.

https://discussions.apple.com/community/windows_software

What file system is being used on the external drive?

I forget the exact wording of the preference/option, but is something like "Ownership" checked on the "Get Info" pane (near the bottom)?

What we need to know is how the external is formatted - is it Mac OS Extended or APFS?