10.4: An overview of NTFS support in Tiger

Aug 04, '05 08:59:00AM

Contributed by: moritzh

Tiger only hintThis has saved me a lot of trouble: It is now possible to reliably read NTFS disks (NT File System, as used by modern Windows versions such as 2000 or XP) under Mac OS X 10.4 (tested under 10.4.1).

Since I have been interested in using disks usable by both Windows and Mac computers and found info in several other hints on this site which, however, are sometimes rather old and have a long comments section which take a while to read and new points spread in between, I thought maybe some people are interested in a short overview on what can currently be done in this area. As I said, several things here may not be big news to some readers, but I am sure at least some people will appreciate an overview, so here we go...

Generally, keep in mind that using a file system other than the 'native' one (HFS+ for a Mac) on any operating system can cause some problems which may come into play at unexpected moments. These problems include losing resource forks and problems with file names and paths (different systems allow different characters, so a name perfectly usable on one system may not be usable on another). If you are interested in knowing about which problems I had with reading NTFS on 10.3.8 and more background, read on, else you can stop here.

In my case, a family member's Windows laptop broke and I convinced her to get a Mac instead, so I needed to get some old data off the laptop's hard disk. While I could read all the important files using 10.3.8 without problem (I took the hard disk out of the laptop computer and put it in an external USB hard disk enclosure, so I could easily plug it in, browse through the directory cotents and sort out what seemed to be valuable data), I decided it would make me feel more comforable to burn a backup of the whole "Documents and Settings" folder to DVD for archival, in case I forgot to tranfer something.

It was impossible, however, to just transfer the whole folder to any location on my Mac. The transfer would always choke somewhere in between by saying such useful things as 'An item with the name "" already exists in this location' or similar. Indeed, it seemed that many files with duplicate names existed in various directories. Their names were all crippled, with the last character showing as "?," I think. Obviously, this problem was related to file names with 'special' chracters such as German Umlaute. E.g. Thunderbird's personal folders or files for mail caused trouble: They were stored with names such as "Persönliche Ordner" in Windows, but the Finder displayed them as "Pers?". Now, if there are two files named "Persönliche Ordner 1" and "Persönliche Ordner 2", two files "Pers?" will show up int the Finder and prevent the copy operation from succeeding since they alppear identical and it is not allowed to have two files with identical names in the same directory.

It seemed that this problem was not only related to the Finder, since I also tried various other things ranging from copying the files in the Terminal using cp, using Disk Utilty to either copy the whole disk or to create images in different formats from the folders I wanted backed up, and I also tried direct backing up to DVD using Roxio Toast Titanium, but all failed with various error messages. Toast, for instance, verified all files before commencing burning, but then failed somewhere in the middle, stating it could not find a file. So it looked like it was due to poor file system support in Mac OS X for NTFS. After hours of trying I was about to give up, but since I had just upgraded another Mac to 10.4, I finally gave it a try on that one, and -- lo and behold -- it worked like a charm!

Too bad I didn't try earlier; the reason was that that particular Mac running on 10.4.1 does not have a DVD drive, so I always tried on machines with DVD drives, but which were all on 10.3.8. So things have indeed improved a lot since then in terms of reliability. As I could not easily find a note about this fact on the internet after my discovery, I decided to post this here, hoping to maybe save someone else the trouble I had. Note that this may very well have appeared in 10.4.1 -- I quickly searched for "NTFS Tiger" on Apple's support site and was pointed to the 10.4.1 update page which, however does not contain the word "NTFS" anywhere on it (not even on the page with the detail info). Ah well...

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