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Will Leopard Read NTFS?

acfusion29

acfusion29

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Alright, I got a sick new 500GB External HDD, and I have A LOT of files that are way over 4GB, and of course... the harddrive comes pre-formatted with FAT32...

If I format it to NTFS using my Windows machine, will my Mac read it? Will my Mac allow me to add content onto the harddrive still?

I have a lot of important files that I don't wanna risk losing on my PC, but then again I'd like to backup some of my stuff on my Mac.

Any help would be appreciated 😀 :apple:
 
Leopard can read NTFS but can't write to it. There are ways to do that though which you can very likely find out about by searching the forums.
 
I'm not sure entirely what you mean but I know that I have a Windows box that I use as a file server and I can read/write to all the disks on that machine which are NTFS formatted. If you're asking for more specifics (time machine backups/restoration, etc.) I really couldn't say but for basic read/write functionality I haven't had any issues so far.
 
nigrunze said:
Leopard can read NTFS but can't write to it. There are ways to do that though which you can very likely find out about by searching the forums.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I should change the title.

I know it reads, but I can't write to it.

I will do a search 🙂
 
That's really strange. I'm a mac newbie (just got my mbp less than a month ago) but I swear that I download a movie file or something then transfer it from the MBP to a shared folder on my Windows box. I don't know if I'm just hallucinating or what but the file is there and works.
 
It can read, but not write. You can use third party software to write, but MS haven't released the specifications for NTFS so I don't know how reliable it is...
 
Free solution:

- MacFUSE
- NTFS-3G

at http://www.macupdate.com/search.php?arch=all&keywords=ntfs&os=macosx

I would test it on a test system/drive first.

MacUpdate user "pen_sq" mentioned this might be slow, and provided an idea:
"How about using Parallels/VMWare to attach a USB drive to a virtual
windows, and then drag files between MacFinder and MS-Explorer? That
should give reasonably fast access."


There is a paid solution too (NTFS for Mac OS X, demo available), but some said that it's similar to the free solution.
 
I found it easier to force Windows to use the Mac formatted disks with Mac Drive than to enable a Mac to use NTFS which seems more uncommon.

Another solution is transfer files using VMWare/Paralles/Boot Camp connected to a NTFS drive.
 
^^ Another +1 for MacDrive. It allows Windows to see your HFS+ (Mac) disks and read/write to them with no problems. Heck, I installed Supreme Commander to my HFS+ partition from windows and it runs just fine.

MacFUSE is slow (that is, the write speed to the NTFS partition is slow). The developer himself acknowledges this and explains why. NTFS for Mac OS X, made by Paragon, is much faster. Not free, but it works perfectly.
 
Bernard Bernoul said:
That's really strange. I'm a mac newbie (just got my mbp less than a month ago) but I swear that I download a movie file or something then transfer it from the MBP to a shared folder on my Windows box. I don't know if I'm just hallucinating or what but the file is there and works.
Click to expand...
That'd work, if you used a network to copy the file from your MBP to your Windows shared folder. 🙂
 
OS X can read and WRITE to a Shared NTFS drive. If just can't natively write to NTFS.

So all you have to do is use a Windows machine to share out the drive/folder and you can read/write to it.

-Kevin
 
Bernard Bernoul said:
That's really strange. I'm a mac newbie (just got my mbp less than a month ago) but I swear that I download a movie file or something then transfer it from the MBP to a shared folder on my Windows box. I don't know if I'm just hallucinating or what but the file is there and works.
Click to expand...

It can write to NTFS drives over a network but not to one directly connected to the mac.
 
kbmb said:
OS X can read and WRITE to a Shared NTFS drive. If just can't natively write to NTFS.

So all you have to do is use a Windows machine to share out the drive/folder and you can read/write to it.

-Kevin
Click to expand...

Its not writing directly to the drive, its actually requesting using SMB which is file system agnostic. So its safe to say that OS X can only READ natively from NTFS file systems.
 
i use MacDrive and NTFS for Mac OS X 6.0. both excellent programs i highly recommend them. but they are not opensource.

MacDrive - read/write to HFS+
NTFS for OS X - read/write to NTFS

macdrive alows me to listen to my itune library on my OS X disk which is very useful and i open a lot of documents for uni while using office in boot camp.
NTFS for OS X allows me to download windows apps and drivers in OS X and then drag them to my boot camp partition.
 
macfuse and the new stable release of the ntfs3g drivers are great.
now your ntfs drives are automounted via ntfs3g.
you should def. check it out.

there is another software called paragon ntfs for mac which is shareware
 
writeous said:
Spotlight (search) in Leopard CAN NOT read nfts files at all unlike Tiger, nobody seems to notice it though.
Click to expand...

this is one of the new spotlight features i actually like. in tiger i used to use a script to unmount my boot camp partition as a login item so no useless win crap showed up in the spotlight window.
 
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