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Can Leopard read and write to drives formatted in NTFS?

T

Tsurisuto

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I'm in a bit of a predicament. My college have updated their computers to Windows Vista 64-bit. I have an Aluminium iMac running 10.5.2 at home and I need to constantly transfer large files (5GB) that I am working on back and forth from college on an external Drive I have.

I would have used MacDrive, but it doesn't support Vista x64. My teacher says that he read somewhere that Leopard can read and write to NTFS. Is this true? If so, how do I format a Drive so that Vista and Leopard can read and write to it?
 
Leopard its self cannot, but i believe there are 3rd party apps which will allow it. but i think those apps only support write speeds of about 2MB/s
 
if you want to be able to use your external on both types of machines, you have a couple different options. if your external is formatted for mac, you're going to need to reformat it as NTFS (make sure to backup your files!) your other option is to partition the drive with both a mac and ntfs partition, which is what i opted to do. you can use disk utility to do either of these. if you decide to go with having both a mac and ntfs partition, you must wipe the entire drive and make sure that the partition map is set to "master boot record" and not "apple partition map" otherwise you won't be able to get the ntfs parition working.

after you've got your external set up, install macfuse (make sure to download and install the correct file, there is one for tiger (10.4) and one for leopard (10.5)) and then ntfs-3g (latest stable build) and then you will be able to write to the ntfs drive/partition... as tiger and leopard can only read from ntfs drives. ntfs-3g requires macfuse, so you must install both, and i'm not sure if it matters, but i'd install macfuse first, then ntfs-3g. if you decided to go with both mac and ntfs partitions, when you plug in your drive you will see two icons on the desktop, one is your mac partition, the other your ntfs partition.. both of which you can now read and write to. and of course, when you plug your external into your school's computers.. the ntfs drive/partition will mount and you're good to go!
 
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