Finder setting with external drive

[sportster]

We just picked up a new 15" MacBook Pro last week. (love it by the way) It puts my old 20" iMac 2.4 to shame... It's running 10.6.6

For the life of me I can not remember how to change the way Finder opens an external hard drive. The drive is a Seagate FreeAgent mini USB (320GB) formatted in NTFS. When I open the drive it open up with a basic finder window, no toolbar or path info. I can change it to look the way we want, but when we remove and retry it goes back.

Am I overlooking a setting somewhere? Or is that how OS X handles non Mac formatted drives?

 

[kainjow]

My best guess:

When you customize view options within the Finder, it tries to remember what you changed by storing the values inside an invisible file named ".DS_Store" (the . at the beginning is standard way for making a file invisible on Mac OS X).

But, Mac OS X cannot write to an NTFS volume out of the box, it can only read it. So, this ".DS_Store" file is never actually written to the volume, thus your settings are not saved.

There is a free software you can install called NTFS-3G which will let you write to an NTFS volume. You could try installing this and see if the issues persists or not.