Repair Permission on NTFS disk?

This is kind of a complex situation, so bear with me as there are a lot of variables here:

I've got an NTFS formatted disk on a Mac Pro with Windows XP Bootcamp. Windows is installed on a separate disc partitioned as Bootcamp (300 GB), and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (700GB). Mac OS is on the original disc that came with the Mac Pro. I'm also using Tuxera to give me read/write permissions on the NTFS disk on the Mac OS.

I have had a minor problem with the NTFS only disk that resulted in having to reformat the entire disk recently. This NTFS disk is now dedicated as nothing but music file storage, with iTunes using it as it's primary library, from both the Windows and Mac OS's, but only the Mac iTunes is organizing the files, so I use that iTunes installation only to add new music files, fix tags and artwork etc. On the Windows side, I just add the new files after they've been added on the Mac side, and fix some tags and artwork don't get "picked up" Windows iTunes.

The problem I'm seeing is a typical one reported by a LOT of iTunes users. Quite a lot of files are being reported as missing by iTunes. They're not missing. Every one can easily be relinked straight in the library on the NTFS disk.

Now I have a script from Doug's iTunes Scripts installed (that I have not used yet), that's supposed to relocate "missing" files. Of course it only works on Mac, but that's okay because oddly, the missing file problem is much worse on the Mac OS than it is on Windows.

This is a HUGE music library, so I'm not too surprised at seeing this problem, and am prepared to have to maintain it more so than a library of, say, less than a thousand files.

The instructions that come with Doug's script recommend a couple of things before running the script:

1. Repair Permissions.
2. Setting iTunes as default player for all music files.

I HATE the second option because I tend to check a lot of music files before adding them to iTunes to make sure they're good, and having them play in iTunes automatically adds them to the library before I'm ready. If I have to do it, I suppose I have to, and will have to remember to right click and "open with" another application, which is a royal pain because my stupid mouse tends to double click to easily, opening them in iTunes anyway, but "it is what it is," I suppose.

The first step also concerns me because this is not a Mac disk.

Does anyone know if running "Repair Permissions" from the Mac OS might cause any problems with an NTFS disc?

Would it be better to boot in Windows and run Disk Check?

Also, if anyone has ever used this "Doug's Script" on an NTFS disc, do you have any insight as to whether there are any problems doing so?

This is the script I'm talking about:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=itunestrackcpr

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

derbothaus said:

It wont cause anything to happen if you want to run it on the Windows partition. It will repair system file permissions on the OS X side. Permissions in OS X are POSIX based Unix permissions. Does not have anything to do with the file system type (ie. NTFS or HFS+) Everything to do with the OS type. Repairing Permissions calls the diskutil app in OS X.
Tuxera is not "permission" based, it is file system interpreter. It let's HFS+ volumes communicate with NTFS volumes via a plug-in. Permissions after the interpretation are based on the respective host OS's. It may be your problem actually. Though I would never trust the setup you are using. You would be better off with a NAS or server based file location so a plug-in is not needed to interpret file types. Point both libraries to that location although that gets weird too thanks to apples metadata demands. They have an official "This is how to use/migrate/duplicate libraries thing somewhere on their site. Sorry no link.

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Well, I probably should have actually opened the disk utility before asking this. I did, yesterday, and discovered that "Repair Permissions" wasn't even available, so I had to go into Windows first and run Disk Check anyway. I also ran Defrag on it, so I'm not going to be too surprised if iTunes lost some more files. That's not too big a deal though. It it did, I'm just going to rebuild the library from scratch.

(On a side note, does anyone have any idea why it takes so long for Mac to build a large library? 7000+ files? It took four hours last time, yet iTunes on Windows XP on the same computer, with the exact same library only took a little over half an hour! Odd?)

I'm booted in Windows right now, so I will check later if anything changed in Mac Disk Utility. I have a feeling it still won't be available.

If it's not, do you think it's safe to run Disk Repair on the Mac side? I suspect it is, but I've got a lot of files on it now, with no back ups, and I really don't want to loose them again.

That's what I thought. Hopefully the disk check and defrag helped, though disk check didn't find any problems.

Otherwise I guess I may have to rebuild the library periodically. Which means I'll end up using Windows primarily for playing and organizing, since the Mac OS is so slow at it.

Does anyone know why on Earth Windows iTunes is so much faster and better at this? Doesn't make sense to me since it is a Mac program.

I'm guessing it's simply because it is an NTFS drive, which it has to be if I want both iTunes to be able to read/write to the music drive.

goMac said:

This all sounds like issues with your NTFS driver.

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Mac Fuse and Tuxera? Yeah, I'm betting it's just too much crap to go through. Still, even just updating stuff like Artist Names or years takes munites for just one album where it only takes a split second on Windows. Heck, even adding several albums at a time takes less than a second on Windows. It can take five to ten minutes on OS X.

EDIT: I'm talking about albums that are on the Windows drive, transferring to the NTFS disk, where the library resides. I'm doing the same whether from XP iTunes, or OS X iTunes.

Yeah, I got it guys. I'm pretty much down to managing and playing only on Windows unfortunately.

BTW, for the record, MAC disk utility options are not available whatsoever for NTFS disc formatted by Windows so my entire query is moot.

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chrfr said:

As someone else mentioned, give exFAT a look. You'd need to download the driver for XP from Microsoft but it works natively in OS X with full read/write support.

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Thanks. I will at some point when I find more time. Probably will start off with a partition on the same disk experimentally first.