Copy files from a Macintosh to an External Hardrive with an NTFS filesystem?

[Wolfmight]

How can I do this? I need to copy some files from a Macintosh computer onto my External Hardrive. Macintosh says it is "Read Only", so it refuses to copy any files to the my hardrive! Are there any programs out there that will allow me to copy files from the mac onto my hardrive in NTFS? Is there a way to do it in OSX Tiger itself?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[balamw]

Is there a way to do it in OSX Tiger itself?

Extremely doubtful, at least until the intel migration.

At which point someone will probably do what they did for linux, translate OS X calls to the native windows driver and have it do the heavy lifting.

Make a FAT32 partition on the drive?

B

 

[Wolfmight]

Extremely doubtful, at least until the intel migration.

At which point someone will probably do what they did for linux, translate OS X calls to the native windows driver and have it do the heavy lifting.

Make a FAT32 partition on the drive?

B

Then how come you can copy a file from the Internet from a macintosh file system hardrive to an NTFS file system hardrive? It allows any file to copy with this method...even if it's an unsupported extension.

Is there some software that could emulate this process?

 

[Danksi]

I heard about this before I got my iMac. I came across the problem last night. I could copy files from my NTFS external drive, but not back to it.

I considered the FAT32 option, which is compatible with both Mac and Windows, but I understand there's an individual file size restriction of around 4Gb with FAT32.

Since I'm going to be using this external drive for movie editing on the iMac, this restriction may have been a problem in future, so I re-formatted it to OSX.

 

[Danksi]

Then how come you can copy a file from the Internet from a macintosh file system hardrive to an NTFS file system hardrive? It allows any file to copy with this method...even if it's an unsupported extension.

Is there some software that could emulate this process?

Have you tried copying the files across a LAN connection? i.e. configuring the Mac for Windows File Sharing and the external drive connected to a PC, also with File Sharing enabled.

That should work, so long as you're not looking for performance.

 

[balamw]

Have you tried copying the files across a LAN connection?

Yup! Networking is the great equalizer. Another alternative is TCP/IP over firewire if the PC is so enabled.

I have not heard of any successful read/write NTFS drivers that don't ultimately just use the MS drivers.

I've got the same issues as Danksi in that I'd like to be able to use an external firewire drive for video on my iBook and still be able to at least read the files on my PC, particularly since I didn't spring for the Superdrive in the iBook.

XP can't natively read or write HFS+, but at least the Mac can natively read NTFS and FAT32. If you format the drive HFS, you could potentially use MacDrive http://www.mediafour.com/ to access it on the XP system. Does anyone have any experience with that route?

B

 

[Wolfmight]

Can partition magic add an HFS+ filesystem partition to my hardrive?
I have just finished making a 4GB FAT32 Partition to copy over files smaller than 4GB onto my external hardrive. I can load one in the slot, then pull it from the FAT32 into my NTFS partition using a windows operating system. It's a little wacky, but I believe it should work.

 

[Sic]

i had this exact problem yesterday with an external hard drive. in the end, i decided to format the whole drive to FAT32. ok so there's a 4Gb filesize limit, but i can take that, seeing as the machine won't be used for video editing, and i never made a web page that was 4Gb!!

if you're using it for video editing, why dont you format the external drive to FAT32 and have the internal drive for your video editing. then you can rar the video into separate files to transport it. not only would that save time copying across, it'd also work!

edit: also, someone told me yesterday that you can only read one partition at a time on a mac. i dont know how true that is, but it certainly seemed plausible.

 

[dubbz]

If you're feeling adventurous, and is not running Tiger, there's an ext2 driver for available for OS X. Combined with the ext2 driver for Windows, you have a alternative way to move files between OS X and Windows outside a network. ext2 doesn't have the 4GB filesize limit that FAT32 does.

Nice if you own all the machines you move files between. Not so nice otherwise, since you most likely have to install a driver. Definitely not nice if you're using an iPod, since the iPod OS can't read the ext2 fs and it'll be useless for playing music.

Disclamer: If you b0rk your system, don't blame me

 

[jdechko]

XP can't natively read or write HFS+, but at least the Mac can natively read NTFS and FAT32. If you format the drive HFS, you could potentially use MacDrive http://www.mediafour.com/ to access it on the XP system. Does anyone have any experience with that route?

B

MacDrive works fairly well. I havent played with it in a while though. My iPod was a Mac version, and I bought XPlay (MacDrive + iPod software) at first. Then came iTunes, but iTunes + XPlay screwed stuff up. Then I realized that I could format my iPod as FAT32.... It would have saved me $20 bucks.

Anyway, to answer the question, Mediafour is a good company and the MacDrive software should work well for reading HFS from Windows.

Edit: There's a free trial available from mediafour, so give it a go.