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tblrsa

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 14, 2010
244
2
My workflow depends on a stable NTFS Driver, so I wonder if NTFS 3G will still work under OSX Lion? If not, is there any other solution for Lion out there yet? Doesn´t have to be blazing fast, only stable.

Thanks for your answer.
 

PeterHolbrook

macrumors 68000
Sep 23, 2009
1,617
439
My workflow depends on a stable NTFS Driver, so I wonder if NTFS 3G will still work under OSX Lion? If not, is there any other solution for Lion out there yet? Doesn´t have to be blazing fast, only stable.

Thanks for your answer.

I don't know about NTFS 3G and Lion, but I do know Paragon NTFS for OS X v9 works fine with the Lion GM.
 

CylonGlitch

macrumors 68030
Jul 7, 2009
2,956
268
Nashville
FYI, I just found out that you can format your drives with exFAT and it will give you the same feature set as NTFS but will be read/writeable by both Mac and PC. And, the part I didn't know. They added support for exFAT to windows XP with one of the patches; so it works fine there too. So unless you have an old XP machine that is unpatched, or something older then XP, exFAT will be more universal.

I was going to buy Paragon for home, but now I don't need to. :D
 

PeterHolbrook

macrumors 68000
Sep 23, 2009
1,617
439
FYI, I just found out that you can format your drives with exFAT and it will give you the same feature set as NTFS but will be read/writeable by both Mac and PC. And, the part I didn't know. They added support for exFAT to windows XP with one of the patches; so it works fine there too. So unless you have an old XP machine that is unpatched, or something older then XP, exFAT will be more universal.

I was going to buy Paragon for home, but now I don't need to. :D

That might be unwise. Unless you install an optional TFAT component, exFAT stores a single copy of the file allocation table and the free space map, which tend to be damaged when drives aren't properly ejected. That's the main reason why regular FAT, NTFS and other file systems have a double number of such components. Damaging the single file allocation table of an exFAT drive is tantamount to losing part or all of its contents. I'd think it over if I were you.
 

coasterider

macrumors 6502
Jun 29, 2010
250
99
Washington, DC
Just installed Lion and NTFS-3G is not working. I should have been more careful, but I can't seem to find anything to update it with that is free anymore. My external hard drive and my bootcamp partition are not coming up. The Windows partition is what is worrying me the most.
 

CylonGlitch

macrumors 68030
Jul 7, 2009
2,956
268
Nashville
Damaging the single file allocation table of an exFAT drive is tantamount to losing part or all of its contents. I'd think it over if I were you.

Thanks for the tip, I didn't know that. I mean, every version the FAT file system so far has had multiple FAT tables. That seems like a major oversight to me. :(

BUT it doesn't really affect my use for it. I just use three different external hard drives when ripping my DVD collection. One machine, a PC, with a BluRay drive rips all my DVD's and BluRays to external hard drives. I then take that drive to the Mac for encoding and tagging. Then back to another PC that acts as an iTunes server. Only the external drives I use exFAT; if one gets corrupted, I haven't lost anything because I have the original discs. I just lose some time having to start over.

If I was using them for something critical, then yeah, this wouldn't be good.
 

iceberg303

macrumors newbie
Apr 16, 2009
8
0
Indiana
NTFS is read only
NTFS with write support can be purchased from a 3rd party

The company that developed NTFS-3G (formerly an open source implementation of NTFS) no longer offers source or a free version that runs in Lion, you will have to revert back to 10.6 if you want NTFS write abilities for free.

This is disappointing as for files >3.5G you need NTFS if you want devices like your 360, PS3, Popcornhour or other set top denies with external HD capabilities to be able to use it.

This will go in my 'Lion No Longer King EPIC FAIL' list.

Can we get a refund on Lion? It's useless to me w/o NTFS write support.
 

iceberg303

macrumors newbie
Apr 16, 2009
8
0
Indiana
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

use this. I just downloaded OSX lion and I am currently using my external HD just fine!

hope this helps!

Not really, it's only a 15 day trial and I won't support them because ntfs-3g was originally free and open source till they yanked it. Bad form. There is another company that makes a commercial solution but I don't know how well it works and the name escapes me at the moment.
 

Kevenly

macrumors regular
Nov 22, 2008
141
66
The wrong planet.
Paragon NTFS. A few months ago it was free from giveawayoftheday.com. It might come around on GOTD again someday. I hope so because GOTD is generally a Windows giveaway site, but occasionally they have the Mac OS counterparts. In this instance they gave away Paragon HFS for Windows and Paragon NTFS for OS X, but I didn't see the link to the NTFS for Mac at the time so missed out on the license. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it comes back someday soon, as most software at GOTD does come back around sooner or later. Losing NFS 3G is a huge disappointment, and really disgusting that a company is capitalizing on something that was developed through open source in this way. They charge quite a lot for it too. It's nice to be able to write to my NTFS volumes from OS X but I can live without it until a reasonably priced solution presents itself.
 

DualShock

macrumors 6502a
Jun 29, 2008
568
121
Not really, it's only a 15 day trial and I won't support them because ntfs-3g was originally free and open source till they yanked it. Bad form.

Where did you see this? Tuxera still offers NTFS-3g as a free and open source download:

http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

It's just that the Mac OS X build has not been updated in a long time.

Is Lion running a 64 bit kernel only? If so, the reason NTFS-3g won't work is because of MacFUSE, which doesn't work properly in 64 bit, not because of NTFS-3g proper.

FWIW, Erik Larsson (IIRC, the developer of the OS X build of NTFS-3g), posted a custom version of MacFUSE that he says should work in Lion (I haven't tried it as I'm running the 32 bit SL kernel and haven't upgraded to Lion yet):

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3156578562014006371&postID=2651866977865603342

Link is posted about 4 or 5 posts from the bottom.
 

Marauder1024

macrumors newbie
Mar 17, 2011
3
0
Not really, it's only a 15 day trial and I won't support them because ntfs-3g was originally free and open source till they yanked it. Bad form. There is another company that makes a commercial solution but I don't know how well it works and the name escapes me at the moment.

NTFS-3G is still free and Open Source...
http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/
http://tuxera.com/opensource/ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs-2011.4.12.tgz

It's just that there are no OSX binaries available from the latest source yet. That should change soon however now that Lion is officially available.
 

Maccleduff

macrumors regular
Jun 26, 2007
247
0
Where did you see this? Tuxera still offers NTFS-3g as a free and open source download:

http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

It's just that the Mac OS X build has not been updated in a long time.

Is Lion running a 64 bit kernel only? If so, the reason NTFS-3g won't work is because of MacFUSE, which doesn't work properly in 64 bit, not because of NTFS-3g proper.

FWIW, Erik Larsson (IIRC, the developer of the OS X build of NTFS-3g), posted a custom version of MacFUSE that he says should work in Lion (I haven't tried it as I'm running the 32 bit SL kernel and haven't upgraded to Lion yet):

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3156578562014006371&postID=2651866977865603342

Link is posted about 4 or 5 posts from the bottom.

Thanks for the links.
Has anyone tried it out in Lion yet? I might wait for an "official release".
 

coasterider

macrumors 6502
Jun 29, 2010
250
99
Washington, DC
This is working for me. In the process of testing it now, transferring a 6 gig file now, I have no write capabilities without NTFS-3G, looking for the latest version of that now:

"Pmcarrion replied on 23 Feb 2011
You should follow these steps in order to have the latest version of MacFuse:
1) Install http://macfuse.googlecode.com/files/MacFUSE-2.0.3,2.dmg - RESTART
2) Install http://www.tuxera.com/mac/macfuse-core-10.5-2.1.9.dmg - RESTART
3) Install http://content.wuala.com/contents/g...cFUSE.prefPane-2.0-64-bit-2009-09-10.zip?dl=1

Now you have the latest version of MacFuse and the 64bit prefpane.


from:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23729/macfuse"

Update: I installed NTFS-3G 2010.10.2 and have some write capabilities back. However I am getting an error message along the lines of the drives not responding in 15 seconds, but one of them came up anyway.
 
Last edited:

Maccleduff

macrumors regular
Jun 26, 2007
247
0
This is working for me. In the process of testing it now, transferring a 6 gig file now, I have no write capabilities without NTFS-3G, looking for the latest version of that now:

"Pmcarrion replied on 23 Feb 2011
You should follow these steps in order to have the latest version of MacFuse:
1) Install http://macfuse.googlecode.com/files/MacFUSE-2.0.3,2.dmg - RESTART
2) Install http://www.tuxera.com/mac/macfuse-core-10.5-2.1.9.dmg - RESTART
3) Install http://content.wuala.com/contents/g...cFUSE.prefPane-2.0-64-bit-2009-09-10.zip?dl=1

Now you have the latest version of MacFuse and the 64bit prefpane.


from:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23729/macfuse"

Update: I installed NTFS-3G 2010.10.2 and have some write capabilities back. However I am getting an error message along the lines of the drives not responding in 15 seconds, but one of them came up anyway.

thanks for the info I have the same version of macfuse installed now, and using ntfs-3G 2010.5.22 which also throws up the 15.000s error box but it still works, mounts the bootcamp drive now at least. guess we're still waiting for a proper lion ready release still....
 

iceberg303

macrumors newbie
Apr 16, 2009
8
0
Indiana
This is working for me. In the process of testing it now, transferring a 6 gig file now, I have no write capabilities without NTFS-3G, looking for the latest version of that now:

"Pmcarrion replied on 23 Feb 2011
You should follow these steps in order to have the latest version of MacFuse:
1) Install http://macfuse.googlecode.com/files/MacFUSE-2.0.3,2.dmg - RESTART
2) Install http://www.tuxera.com/mac/macfuse-core-10.5-2.1.9.dmg - RESTART
3) Install http://content.wuala.com/contents/g...cFUSE.prefPane-2.0-64-bit-2009-09-10.zip?dl=1

Now you have the latest version of MacFuse and the 64bit prefpane.


from:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23729/macfuse"

Update: I installed NTFS-3G 2010.10.2 and have some write capabilities back. However I am getting an error message along the lines of the drives not responding in 15 seconds, but one of them came up anyway.

The new versions of Tuxera Community(free) are crippled. Wont support some large HD, and only supports something like 100k/s or less transfers. Someone suggested Paragon, I don't know if they have a free version or not.
 

sona2010

macrumors newbie
Nov 26, 2009
2
0
Oceania
thanks for the info I have the same version of macfuse installed now, and using ntfs-3G 2010.5.22 which also throws up the 15.000s error box but it still works, mounts the bootcamp drive now at least. guess we're still waiting for a proper lion ready release still....

I can also attest to this. Nice work to those who shed light on the workaround. Definitely an annoying 15.000s error message, followed by another warning "could not mount" - despite both of these messages, the drive works again just as before the 10.7 Lion update.

I wasted a day on this, eventually finding this thread. So far the only free, working, solution.
 

jace88

macrumors 6502
Jan 3, 2011
320
121
Sydney, Australia

respectabilia

macrumors regular
Oct 24, 2010
236
5
What about DVD compatibility with NTFS-3g in Lion?

I'm having issues with my MBP reading a bank DVD. It doesn't mount, and I receive the following message:

"NTFS-3G could not mount /dev/disk1
at /Volumes/Untitled because the following problem occurred:

Error reading bootsector: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/rdisk1': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.
"

I followed the earlier posted workaround to get external hard drives working with NTFS-3G. But for some reason DVDs still don't work. Any ideas?

All these errors just remind me of my days with Windows...
 
Last edited:

341328

Suspended
Jul 18, 2009
732
952
exFAT

FYI, I just found out that you can format your drives with exFAT and it will give you the same feature set as NTFS but will be read/writeable by both Mac and PC. And, the part I didn't know. They added support for exFAT to windows XP with one of the patches; so it works fine there too. So unless you have an old XP machine that is unpatched, or something older then XP, exFAT will be more universal.

I was going to buy Paragon for home, but now I don't need to. :D

exFAT works... I've been using this on my 2nd internal drive (replaced the DVD drive) for a few months with no issues.

However, in Windows 7, "Preview Versions" feature doesn't work on exFAT drives. :-(

Does Lion have proper stable read and write support for NTFS?
 
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