NTFS filesystems and Windows Virus Issues on USB drives

[asadr]

I'm running 10.5.8 and whenever I plug in a USB drive that's been infected by a Windows PC, strange things happen.

There are files that are not deletable. I've checked the forums and people have complained of similar issues, I've tried changing flags (chflags), tried running everything as root, remounted the drive manually, tried rm -rf. I keep getting an operation not permitted error. Particularly the folders created by the viruses (usually named something like "filesystem" or "RESTORE") are not deletable.

Then a second problem propped up once I was trying to deal with the first one. Sometimes a USB drive will get mounted as read-only. No amount of remounting, forced mount flags, disk utility permissions repair or anything will make it mount as read-write.

Is this some sort of issue with the NTFS drivers or is there a known solution for these problems that I haven't been able to find on the forums?

[LtRammstein]

To OS X, NTFS is not writeable. You will need to install Paragon NTFS. It's a nice plugin to the System Preferences that will give you access to NTFS files systems.

[MisterMe]

Originally Posted by LtRammstein

... You will need to install Paragon NTFS. ...

Paragon NTFS is commercial software. However, NTFS-3G is freeware and does everything that most Mac users require for write-access to NTFS volumes.