[Computer Help] External drive not playing nice with Mac

My Mac started to act weird two days ago and any program I tried to open would instantly crash. That fixed itself after a restart, but in between that time, something happened and my external hard drive went belly-up. My Mac wouldn't recognize the drive and my Windows laptop kept insisting that I format the drive. I had important data on it so I quickly did some research and found a program that allowed me to save most of the data. At the time, I believe the drive was formatted FAT 32 because I was able to use it on my Mac and Windows laptop without any additional program.

So after backing up all my data, I formatted the drive on my Windows laptop and it formatted to NTFS. I ran some diagnostics and it seems the drive. But now, I am on my Mac and I can move any files on the external drive around.

What I want to do is go through each of my files and see which ones were corrupted and which ones survived. I have created a new folder on the external to move the good files to it. I downloaded a program that allows Macs to read/write to NTFS drives, but it still won't let me move files within the external drive. I don't want to go to FAT32 because it seems that that format is more susceptible to going belly-up from bad reboots, etc.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

There is a typo in the original post that might confuse people trying to help me. So here is the cliff notes of the problem:

I can move files from my NTFS formatted external to my Mac, but I cannot move any files from one folder to another folder on the external while on my Mac.

 

I have the full version of NTFS-3G for Mac. That let me edit folder and file names, but still no luck with moving files or folders around. If I try to move a file to another folder on the external, it just creates a short cut. I can move files to my Mac from the external, then it creates the file on there (so it works), but if I try to move it back to the external, it just creates a copy.

Thanks for the help though.

 

I use both the Mac and Windows laptops. Based on internet research, I have two choices: FAT32 or Mac format. The Mac format won't work at all with Windows. The FAT32 is highly susceptible to being corrupted.

I was hoping someone with more experience using a Mac would be able to help.