Files Copied from NTFS Drive to Mac Won't Open

RobertKaucherRobertKaucher Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
in Off-Topic
I know very little about Macs. My wife asked me to move some of the music from her old PC to the Mac and I did via a SATA to USB adapter. Most of the files are fine but the MP#s are all grey and when I try to open them (I can't just click them, I have to do open with) it says they are in use by OSX and cannot be opened. I also cannot copy and paste them. Her account has proper permissions, they are not locked, and I am at a loss. System has been rebooted many, many times. Any ideas? Google has not helped me.
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  • demonfurbiedemonfurbie Member Posts: 1,819 ■■■■■□□□□□
    Try in term
    Chmod 777 *.mp3
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  • onesaintonesaint Member Posts: 801
    demonfurbie wrote: »
    Try in term
    Chmod 777 *.mp3

    you might need to add sudo to that.

    $cd /Volumes/usb-sata drive/mp3 directory
    $sudo chmod 777 [some single file].mp3
    [your wife's]Password:
    $

    if it works, run it on the rest.

    or as most likely that drive is NTFS you can try this as I don't think NTFS RW is native in OS X and that may be the issue.
    10.6: Enable native NTFS read/write support - Mac OS X Hints
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  • WafflesAndRootbeerWafflesAndRootbeer Member Posts: 555
    robertkaucher wrote: »
    i know very little about macs. My wife asked me to move some of the music from her old pc to the mac and i did via a sata to usb adapter. Most of the files are fine but the mp#s are all grey and when i try to open them (i can't just click them, i have to do open with) it says they are in use by osx and cannot be opened. I also cannot copy and paste them. Her account has proper permissions, they are not locked, and i am at a loss. System has been rebooted many, many times. Any ideas? Google has not helped me.

    always use a usb flash drive!
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  • Asif DaslAsif Dasl Member Posts: 2,116 ■■■■■■■■□□
    WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »
    always use a usb flash drive!

    Fixed that for you! :)

    USB drives can be NTFS as well as FAT32, dunno if OSX handles FAT32 better...
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  • WafflesAndRootbeerWafflesAndRootbeer Member Posts: 555
    Asif Dasl wrote: »
    Fixed that for you! :)

    USB drives can be NTFS as well as FAT32, dunno if OSX handles FAT32 better...

    FAT32 is always the way to go. It just works perfectly between Windows and any other OS. If you're going to be porting exceptionally large files (high bitrate HD video for example) between Windows and Mac, HFS is the way to go and getting MacDrive for Windows is well worth the investment.
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  • RobertKaucherRobertKaucher Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
    onesaint wrote: »
    you might need to add sudo to that.

    $cd /Volumes/usb-sata drive/mp3 directory
    $sudo chmod 777 [some single file].mp3
    [your wife's]Password:
    $

    if it works, run it on the rest.

    or as most likely that drive is NTFS you can try this as I don't think NTFS RW is native in OS X and that may be the issue.
    10.6: Enable native NTFS read/write support - Mac OS X Hints

    That was the first thing I tried which is why I wrote:
    RobertKaucher wrote: »
    Her account has proper permissions, they are not locked, and I am at a loss.
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  • RobertKaucherRobertKaucher Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
    WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »
    always use a usb flash drive!
    Well, that's all well and good but doesn't really help the fact that I have 300 files on her tiny little hard drive I can neither delete nor use because they are "being used by OSX."
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  • Novalith478Novalith478 Member Posts: 151
    RobertKaucher wrote: »
    I know very little about Macs. My wife asked me to move some of the music from her old PC to the Mac and I did via a SATA to USB adapter. Most of the files are fine but the MP#s are all grey and when I try to open them (I can't just click them, I have to do open with) it says they are in use by OSX and cannot be opened. I also cannot copy and paste them. Her account has proper permissions, they are not locked, and I am at a loss. System has been rebooted many, many times. Any ideas? Google has not helped me.

    This is why you don't use a Mac lol.

    I had this problem once with my external HD. So I found an extra HD, formatted it FAT32, and lo and behold, it worked. Never bothered to figure out the root cause.
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  • RobertKaucherRobertKaucher Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
    Novalith478 wrote: »
    This is why you don't use a Mac lol.
    But Macs are perfect and never have problems and are totally intuitive and user friendly.
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  • WebmasterWebmaster Admin Posts: 10,292 Admin
    Just a couple of suggestions / things I would try, if you haven't yet:

    - Relaunching Finder (Apple logo at top, then Force Quit, select Finder, press Relaunch), fixes weird behavior sometimes when I try to remove something from Trash
    - Try running [inlinecode]lsof | grep -i somefile.mp3[/inlinecode] to check if something actually is keeping them open/in use and since you said "very little" I will also point out the Activity Monitor (Applications -> Utilities)
    - I know you checked permissions, but I'd let the OS check that again just in case: Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility -> Repair Permissions.
    - Can you rename the file extensions? (mp3 to .rtf, then use Text Editor open file dialog and drag from there to Trash).

    Just a rather uneducated guess (I'm pretty much a "user" myself when it comes to Macs), but did you copy them to an iTunes lib /system folder (rather than importing through iTunes).

    Like some other comments not going to help you solve it, but I always copy files between PC and Mac over the ether (in my case on same WiFi, so on pc map a drive to Mac).
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  • Novalith478Novalith478 Member Posts: 151
    RobertKaucher wrote: »
    But Macs are perfect and never have problems and are totally intuitive and user friendly.

    Yeah...if you're a hipster university student with a trust fund icon_wink.gif
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  • tpatt100tpatt100 Member Posts: 2,991 ■■■■■■■■■□
    Weird, I always share files with my wife's Mac from Windows for years using XP, Vista and now 7. I usually always connect to my Windows share from her Mac though to copy stuff over.
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  • RobertKaucherRobertKaucher Member Posts: 4,299 ■■■■■■■■■■
    tpatt100 wrote: »
    Weird, I always share files with my wife's Mac from Windows for years using XP, Vista and now 7. I usually always connect to my Windows share from her Mac though to copy stuff over.
    It wasn't via a share; which is what I think was the issue. I copied them directly from the NTFS volume via a USB adapter.

    I was able to delete them via terminal, so I am just going to start over with Waffle's suggestion of never using NTFS!
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  • tpatt100tpatt100 Member Posts: 2,991 ■■■■■■■■■□
    RobertKaucher wrote: »
    It wasn't via a share; which is what I think was the issue. I copied them directly from the NTFS volume via a USB adapter.

    I was able to delete them via terminal, so I am just going to start over with Waffle's suggestion of never using NTFS!

    I use a usb thumb drive to copy stuff from my NTFS Win 7 machine over mostly video and music to save time and never seen this before though which is weird. Back in the day when I copied stuff from OSX to Windows though OSX would leave those "_file name" junk files behind on the usb drive.
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