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NTFS-3G Harddrive for Lion. Is formatting the only option?

L

leiza88

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 13, 2011
2
0
Hey guys,

I have a WD external hard drive that worked perfectly well reading and writing with Snow Leopard using a NTFS-3G program. However, after I changed to Lion, it presents me with this when I plug it in:

'NTFS-3G could not mount /dev/disk1s1
at /Volumes/Elements because the following problem occurred:

/Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/fusefs.kext failed to load - (libkern/kext) link error; check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).
the MacFUSE file system is not available (71)'.

It does not even read the drive on Finder.

Is there any way I can retrieve the contents of the drive, or is there something I can do which enables me to use the drive and access the content like before - or must I format the drive and erase everything?

Thanks!
 
stridemat

stridemat

Moderator
Staff member
Apr 2, 2008
11,364
863
UK
Lion and NTFS-3G are having problems (no idea why). Anyway it seems you have a few options:-

1.Don’t upgrade to Lion just yet. If everything works fine now, you may wish to stay with Snow Leopard until there’s a new binary release of NTFS-3G. Lion is still very new and there aren’t many third-party applications taking advantage of its new features as yet.

2.Use NTFS-3G and MacFUSE 2.2 as before. In my experience it works, but you do get an error each time your disk is mounted (which could be on every boot up for some) and it is slow at mounting the disk. If you’re reliant on an NTFS drive you may not want to try this just in case things aren’t working properly and you lose data.

3.Buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac. If you are reliant on an NTFS drive on your Mac, you may want the piece of mind of a commercial, supported product, in which case you can buy Tuxera NTFS for Mac which states that it is Lion-compatible.

4.Use exFAT instead of NTFS. If you need the drive to be usable on both Windows and Mac, don’t need file system level encryption or compression and are willing to copy all of your data off it, reformat it, and copy the data back, then maybe you’d be better with the exFAT file system. It’s the successor to FAT32, and supports disk and file sizes of over 500 terabytes. It’s also quite well-supported – Mac OS X received support for it in the 10.6.5 update to Snow Leopard, Windows XP supports it with the KB955704 update and Service Pack 2, Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 and Windows 7 supports it out of the box. You will have issues with Linux machines, however, in which case FAT32 is also an option.
Click to expand...
]http://www.neilturner.me.uk/2011/08/02/the-state-of-macfuse-and-ntfs-3g-on-os-x-lion.html#whataretheoptions
 
L

leiza88

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 13, 2011
2
0
Ahh, alright. Thanks for the help guys, looks like I'll have to format the drive :(
 
P

PeterHolbrook

macrumors 68000
Sep 23, 2009
1,617
439
leiza88 said:
Ahh, alright. Thanks for the help guys, looks like I'll have to format the drive :(
Click to expand...

You are probably going to do as you wish or as someone in whom you trust will advise. My advice, however, would be for you to try Paragon NTFS for OS X, which works perfectly well under Lion. Now, do as you wish.
 
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