External drive’s files not showing, but I know it has been half-filled with data. It works fine on Ubuntu but not on macOS

disk-utilityexternal-diskhard driventfs

My external hard drive used to work just fine (my OS is Mojave) – I can read and write because I used NTFS Paragon software free trial. But now that I wiped all traces of said software, my external hard drive won't show its contents anymore. I know it's not a problem of the hard drive because when I click on Get Info it says it's half-full. And when I use Ubuntu, I can see and edit the files.

I tried Disk Utility (unmounting,mounting,repairing), booting into Recovery Mode and using Disk Utility to perform the same steps, leaving the external drive for hours, but none worked.

Please help!

EDIT: Solved. I reinstalled NTFS For Mac, restarted by 10-day trial.

Best Answer

On extra checking macos should be able to Read ntfs but not write. But this solution should still work

If you have removed paragon then you have removed the programs that can convert binary data on the disk into something macos understands. Thus you need something like paragon for macos to read it

Now Ubuntu includes the programs to convert the binary data to something Linux can read. So gives a possible solution.

I think the solutions are

  1. restore from a backup not under ntfs eg from you cloud backup. You should always have something like that if you use a Computer
  2. Use paragon or something like that to read the data.
  3. Boot into Ubuntu or Windows and copy the data to another drive formatted in a way that Linux or Windows and macos can read I think that has to be exFat. Copy the data onto this drive. Or copy to a network file server or cloud based server. Then reboot into macos and copy the data from the exfat partition.
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