problem reading an external ntfs hd

Can I please ask the first obvious question?

Is the drive physically connected to the MBP (i.e. Firewire or USB), or is it being served to the Mac over the network by a hosting Windows computer?

 

What differentiates the files you see, from the ones you don't see?

Do you not see new or recently edited files, but see old files?

Do you not see certain trees within the directory structure (like the /xxx folder is missing, but everything else is there)

Or does there seem to be no pattern?

FWIW, you know that MacOS cannot write NTFS, right? So that the best you will be able to do in this scenario is *read* everything....

This might be relevant to you:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050521110452194&lsrc=osxh

Both OS X and Windows allow certain special characters in file names, but how they allow is different...apparently sometimes this can cause headaches....

 

You should be able to, yes.... Although a much safer way to use an NTFS volume, honestly, is to have a Windows computer serve it to you.

I'm not sure why the directories are not visible... my first guess would be something to do with "ejecting" the drive from Windows (however you do this in Windows...) before physically disconnecting it. Sometimes, with modern filesystems, when files are modified, they're modified in such a way that computers other than the modifying computer can't clearly understand the change... it's hard for me to explain without getting really technical. But a lot of times, you see this same pattern with newer files missing when you remove a flash drive from one computer and put it on another, if you're not careful.

 

Mount it on the Windows computer, right click it in My Computer, and edit the sharing preferences so that it is available for share. If you don't already see the Windows computer in your Network on the Mac, then make sure that the Mac is on the same Workgroup as the Windows computer (you get the Workgroup from Control Panel in Windows, and then you set the Mac's workgroup from the Directory Access app in the Utilities folder).

 

WTF?!?! That does not sound right. Does not sound right at all. Are you talking about simply flushing the buffer. e.g. you make something new and dont safely remove it the buffer may not have been flushed and therefore it is not written/not properly written to the drive? Quite frankly, if and OS writes anything to a filesystem another computer will be able to read it if it supports that file system and there are no bugs in either file system. There should be nothing, absolutly nothing computer dependant with the average file system. That is unless you get into that TPM security garbage. Then I can't speak as I dont know much about TPM and what it does.

 

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. And why are you so angry at me? The OP clearly can't read the contents of his disk. What are you doing to help, other than attacking me?

 

Hey

Wasnt really intended as an attack. More of a possible shock into what I was reading. Just the thought of something in a filesystem that is consumer based being computer dependant kind of freaked me out. Sorry bout that. No hosstility was really intended. Having siad that, what I said and what you said were entirly different. I dont think it would be good if the orginal poster thought that some files were computer dependant. That is not in anyway true. The OP should simply learn to 'Safely Remove'/'Eject' his hardware. So I kinda corrected that misconception in a way of helping them.

Update: Switch quote and my msg around

 

Yeah, point taken.... Sorry.