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Mac OS X Can read NTFS?!
- Thread starter DaLurker
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It's brought to you by the power of open-source software - http://www.linux-ntfs.org/
I used to use that under Linux all the time.
O... can't write? too bad... that means I still need to format to Fat32. Btw if I want to transfer files between Mac OS X and NTFS bigger than 4.2gb (or whatever the fat32 limit is), how would I do that?
They can write to ntfs thanks to MacFUSE from Google.
http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2007/01/taming-mac-os-x-file-systems.html
Yes, you're limited to 4 GiB. That's right, with an i.
So, in other words, you can't put a file larger than that in FAT32.
You can split it up in multiple .RAR archives but it's of no real use since you can't extract them.
Yep, so dont even think about storing your DVD images on a FAT32 system..you'll have to split it up into pieces. SL DVDs are 4.38 GiB (gibibytes)
MacFUSE with NTFS-3G is as sloow as molasses. Only good for writing files such as documents/etc. Large files will take forever, and if it ever gets done, the copied file is corrupted on the NTFS drive. Not to mention NTFS-3G/MacFUSE causes your computer to take forever to shut down/restart.
an external firewire drive formatted in FAT32 acting as a liason between OS X and Windows is dramatically faster.
MacFUSE with NTFS-3G is as sloow as molasses. Only good for writing files such as documents/etc. Large files will take forever, and if it ever gets done, the copied file is corrupted on the NTFS drive. Not to mention NTFS-3G/MacFUSE causes your computer to take forever to shut down/restart.
an external firewire drive formatted in FAT32 acting as a liason between OS X and Windows is dramatically faster.
I used to use MacDrive on my PC, but it screwed up one of my drives once when writing, so who knows. It's easier just to network them now. Looking forward to the new file system coming. Kinda works in Leopard right now, but not really.
I do not know if this answers the question. But I had to send my MBP in for repair to Apple. At their suggestion I backed up my HD (Apprx 45G) to my Dell XGM 3.6G XP Machine Second HD across the network using "Superduper". Once I got the unit back I restored the drive using "Disk Utility". There were a few bugs; Original user login was wiped but got around that by reinstalling and archiving off OSX D1 and recreated the user acount from "Root". Once that was accomplished I reset a few other items and all is pretty much well. So to end, I do not know if their is a size limit and a sparces but I was able to use my XP Machine as a backup and recover all my files and get back up and running. And its my belief that if I had not did a "Disk-Cleanup & Defrag" on my XP machine then I may have not lost the original user account to begin with. So My Bad on that one I think.....Thankfully I am back in buisness!
Bill.......
I do not know if this answers the question. But I had to send my MBP in for repair to Apple. At their suggestion I backed up my HD (Apprx 45G) to my Dell XGM 3.6G XP Machine Second HD across the network using "Superduper". Once I got the unit back I restored the drive using "Disk Utility". There were a few bugs; Original user login was wiped but got around that by reinstalling and archiving off OSX D1 and recreated the user acount from "Root". Once that was accomplished I reset a few other items and all is pretty much well. So to end, I do not know if their is a size limit and a sparces but I was able to use my XP Machine as a backup and recover all my files and get back up and running. And its my belief that if I had not did a "Disk-Cleanup & Defrag" on my XP machine then I may have not lost the original user account to begin with. So My Bad on that one I think.....Thankfully I am back in buisness!
Bill.......
Your use of the Dell hard drive under File Sharing over the network has nothing to do with NTFS or not. The Mac was addressing the volume as a SMB share, the underlying format of the drive was not relevant to that. The Windows OS was managing the drive, the Mac was seeing only the logical Shared volume.
When your connected to an NTFS volume over a network OS X doesn't actually talk to the NTFS volume directly, rather it uses SMB. OS X doesn't care (or know) what the underlying filesystem is.
Interesting to see it mostly worked though.
Eh, yes and no. While this has been accomplished, there seems to be no publicly available NTFS for MacFUSE.
Thanks CanadaRAM and tyr2!...Explains a lot more about how it shares with others. And, Yes!! I am glad it worked. Was sweating bullets over that one!
Bill.......
Bill.......
I wish Microsoft would have just copied the Mac OS Extended file format in their products. They could have called it Microsoft OS Extended file format.
Use it myself. It works, but not great. I wouldn't trust it for anything important. Not yet.
S'good 1st start though.
For <4.whatever gig. In this world of firewire and DV cams...I've got dozens of 12 gig files that I have on NTFS formatted External drivers. I should be able to read them on a Mac (when I get one) - but say I capture a 12 gig file on my future mac...how would I then get that onto my PC?
I have to admit - this is one of the last areas where I am still switch-unsure. I'm swtiching this summer - but this is just about the only area where I'm nervous about it.
Doug
djellison- in terms of getting mac drives to be read by PCs, there is always MacDrive: http://www.mediafour.com/
I've been using version 6 with my HFS+ formatted drives, and I haven't had any issues. If you're trying to get Windows to read a mac drive, there are alternatives.
I've been using version 6 with my HFS+ formatted drives, and I haven't had any issues. If you're trying to get Windows to read a mac drive, there are alternatives.
If you are keeping the PC and will have this running at the same time as the Mac then you can just leave the external drives connected to your PC, set sharing on the drives and your Mac will be able to read from and write to them with no issues.
If you need to be able to plug the external drives into both your Mac and your PC then you could format the drives using a more robust file system, such as Ext2, and then use the available drivers to provide read and write support. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext2
http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/
Sean
Not heard of Ext2 before - I'll give it a look. My likely solution is going to be a large Raid 5 array on the desktop PC over gbit networking, but it's always cool to have options available!
Cheers
Doug
Cheers
Doug