Mac and NTFS
I tried to upload photos from my camera to my LaCIE removable hard drive through Mac, but failed miserably. The drive itself is found okay, but as it has NTFS filesystem, Mac OS X can mount it only as read-only.
Apple is quiet about this issue in www.apple.com/switch/. When you read the answer to question How do I share files?, there’s no mention about writing disks:
Consider USB or FireWire removable hard disks or floppy drives, or a USB keychain flash memory device. Macs can read Windows formatted disks, making it easy to exchange Zip disks, portable hard drives or other portable media between Macs and PCs.
There are some preliminary support for writing to NTFS disks, but I don’t want to endanger my photo collection by fooling around with hacks.
1. bronxmac — Thursday, Jan 13 2005
I thought I had read something about Tiger’s ability to work better with NTFS somewhere (and maybe write to it), but when looking at Apple’s Tiger site, I only found this, which implies no improvement:
images.apple.com/macosx/tiger/pdf/Tiger_Windows_TP_20050111.pdf (see bottom paragraph of page two)
I guess MS is being a pain.
2. Art — Friday, Jan 14 2005
NTFS is a proprietary Microsoft format and nothing writes to it - Linux doesn’t even really write to it.
3. Bill Maxwell — Friday, Jan 14 2005
Backup the files using your PC. Then format that drive as FAT 32. Then restore them. FAT 32 works on both Windoze and Mac OS X. NTFS support is not stellar anywhere outside of Windoze. NTFS has some advantage over FAT 32. But if working with both Mac and Windoze is needed. FAT 32 is a better way to go.
4. Janne — Friday, Jan 14 2005
Thanks for the advices, guys. My laptop is currently with my wife in Strasbourg and she is coming back home today. Maybe I’ll convert the file system during weekend.
I have a backup of the files in another Windows system already — learned this when I lost all my data back in 1998.
In fact, I know how to do these things and that’s not the problem. I understood from Apple’s advertisements and testimonials that Macs work perfectly with Windows systems. Some parts of the equation, such as network drives, works perfectly. Others are still substandard. I feel that Apple’s promises let me down.
5. Mike — Friday, Jan 14 2005
Better than FAT32 is to format drive as Mac OS Extended and then instal MacDrive on your XP PC.
MacDrive permits mount/read/write of Mac OS Extended.
If you use FAT32, there are limits to filename characters that can be used, and max file size limits.
Mike
6. Janne — Saturday, Jan 15 2005
Mike, I can’t risk the interoperability with different PCs, as I’m currently using the external drive with two PC computers and in the future I may have to use it with others, including Linux.
I think that FAT32 is okay for me, as the files come from digital camera that has just FAT filesystem. Maybe I’ll repartition the disk and have a Mac partition for backing up my PowerBook, thanks for the tip.
7. Alfred L — Friday, Apr 22 2005
Hi, i am having the same problem with writting to NTFS external disk on my powerbook. I googled and found this blog. Could I jus ask if it is ok to have a FAT32 and Mac OS Extended format on two different partitions of ONE external harddik?Thanks for the assistant.
8. Janne — Monday, Apr 25 2005
Alfred, I tried that with my LaCIE big disk and failed. Complete report can be found in this article
Hopefully you can get it working. If you do, please report it here with instructions, so I can try it, too.
9. Gil — Tuesday, Aug 9 2005
The Major problem with “sharing” FAT32 formatted drive between Windows and OSX is Fat32 has a 4GB file size limit, which NTFS does not. Any solutions?
10. Janne — Tuesday, Aug 9 2005
Gil, you can use Mac OS X (HFS+) formatted drives in Windows with MacDrive or then mount them through network.
11. Judson Nichols — Monday, Aug 22 2005
I got a usb drive and formatted it ntfs. Never imagined that my mac wouldn’t write to it. I’m really let down. Unless, MS has blocked them from doing it, in which case way stinking poo on them. Who’s ever at fault it’s unforgivable.
12. Janne — Monday, Aug 22 2005
NTFS format is not publicly available and supporting it requires either a) reverse engineering the filesystem or b) getting a license from Microsoft.
Apple’s NTFS support is most probably based on the Linux NTFS project that has good read support and buggy write support. In other words, Apple has picked only the low hanging fruits and not paid any real money to MS for getting the spec to write the full support.
13. Jabba — Thursday, Mar 2 2006
Is there any software for Mac to write on NTFS disks like MacDrive of windows?
14. Janne — Friday, Mar 3 2006
Jabba, I don’t know any. There is a project in SourceForge, but it has not been updated since 2003. If there is a project aiming to have full NTFS support, it would be based on the aforementioned Linux project that is progressing slowly (but steadily).
15. Yen — Sunday, Apr 23 2006
Try PartitionMagic with the PC
PartitionMagic allows partitions larger than 4GB in FAT32. Dunno how it works, but it does.
HOWEVER, switching between operating systems (Win2k, XP, Tiger, OS 9) and filing systems (FAT32, NTFS, HSF+) does create a havoc by leaving all sorts of hidden files (finder.dat, resources.frk, etc.) Eventually, they’ll mount up to a “-39,” or “-50″ error and those files can no longer be read by any operating system. They become “broken” files.
I’m not sure if the type of file has anything to do with this…but it’s only happened to me when copying EPS and QXD files….
I’m still experimenting…
16. chucklesjh — Tuesday, May 23 2006
Yen, Gil was stating that FAT32 does not support files larger than 4GB. You can easily make a partition larger than that, I think the max is 137GB or something like that. I had that problem awhile back when I tried to copy a DVD ISO to my FAT32 disk and it gave me an error. My solution, since I use OSx86, is that I have one disk that has HFS for the OS and a FAT32 partition to share files between Win and OSX.
17. tirasus — Monday, Jul 31 2006
FAT32 has a maximum partition size of 32GB, sorry to break the happy thought of 137GB.
18. Janne — Monday, Jul 31 2006
Tirasus, I think that you are wrong. I’ve got a Lacie external hard drive formatted with FAT32 and its size is 100GB.
Check out this page which says that the maximum size of FAT32 is 2TB = 2048GB. You cannot format bigger partitions that 32GB with Windows XP, but other tools are able to do it. Windows XP happily reads them.
19. El-Taweel — Sunday, Aug 20 2006
@tirasus: I just run chkdsk.exe on my external (FAT formatted) 250 GB harddrive. According to you, this should be impossible:
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume 250GB_FAT32 created 27/2/2006 10:27 PM
Volume Serial Number is XXXX-XXXX
Windows is verifying files and folders…
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problem.
249,569,247,232 bytes total disk space.
20,480 bytes in 3 hidden files.
4,001,792 bytes in 874 folders.
165,191,376,896 bytes in 8.164 files.
84,373,843,968 bytes available on disk.
4,096 bytes in each allocation unit.
60,929,992 total allocation units on disk.
20,599,083 allocation units available on disk.
@Mike: I did try MacDrive with HFS+, however after writing a few hundred files, it started corrupting the file names, randomly cutting (not truncating) them to six or eight letters… that piece of software is even less useful than my cat\\\’s vomit. :-|
Luckily I was just experimenting with and not writing sensible data to that drive…
Had to dig into the registry to remove the stupid red apple icon from the drive symbol in Explorer after repartitioning the disk windows style.
20. dartrax — Thursday, Sep 14 2006
@yen:
You wrote about problems using NTFS, FAT32 and HFS+ on one drive. I have the same troubles, i use Win XP on an NTFS-Partition, HSF+ for mac OS and FAT32 for my own files which should be accessible for both, Tiger and XP. I’m getting corrupted or invisible (really invisible, not just hidden) files over and over, ending up with CHKDSK deleting and putting them into FOUND.000 folders every time I restart XP. The last time I tried to rescue them before booting XP I copied files from FAT32 to HFS+, with the result that I had to re-install Mac OS 10 minutes later. Now, on a clean install and clean formattings of all the partitions, the troubles begin again.
Do you have any idea of a possible solution? It’s hard to find something about those troubles on the web. The next thing I’ll do is claiming that XP’s and Mac’s FAT32 support is incompatible and try to use MacDrive instead, but I had already some troubles with their demo-version (bluescreens).
dartrax
21. Max — Monday, Sep 18 2006
I just want to answer alfreds question, I was able to partition an external hard drive with my mac into three partitions, one was Mac OS Extended and the other two where FAT32 and everything worked out just fine. Though you do have to use the disk uttility after starting up with a OS X system disk and not just the disk utillity on the installed OS X.
22. Dave — Saturday, Mar 24 2007
I just gt a MacBook Pro, and a LaCie Extreme 250 Gig Drive. I just made the switch from Mac to PC. IMHO, it was way easier to simply format my LaCie into 2 FAT32 drives, 50/50 split. Now I can work in both worlds using BootCamp. I gave my XP system 40 Gigs in NTFS, that way I can still manage files greater than 4 Gigs.
I did consider using all three file systems (MacHS/Fat32/NTFS), but didn’t think it was the smartest thing to be doing to my external.
Haven’t had problems as of yet, hopefully I never will….
23. No Lovin’ for the Mac on NTFS // Words and Interwebs — Thursday, Mar 29 2007
[...] Well, I was curious as to why my Mac mini wasn’t turning up Spotlight results for my attached 200GB firewire drive. I knew it was NTFS, and I remember never being able to write to it from a mac, only read. I thought it was just permission issues, so I never investigated further. But now after a little Googlin’, I find that out for sure that it’s more than that. [...]
24. tws — Wednesday, Jul 4 2007
Janne said:”Gil, you can use Mac OS X (HFS+) formatted drives in Windows with MacDrive or then mount them through network.”
check out the macdrive reviews on this page bottom,
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/13831
apple + microsoft sucks… individually… they are just as bad
a lot of pissed off people with no viable workaround
25. javier — Thursday, Aug 23 2007
Came to this site through google…Maybe MacFUSE is the answer for some of you?I just read about it here: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html
Haven’t tried it, but it seems it can read NTFSvolumes in mac os…
Good luck! (and please tell how it works…)/j
26. gantico — Wednesday, Nov 28 2007
There is also a new tool from Paragon that seems to read/write on NTFS with good performances and full access to file rights.
I talk about it in my guide for sharing disks between Mac and PC:http://www.gantico.com/blog/2007/11/mac-pc-sharing-disks/
-CheersGiovanni