10.4: An overview of NTFS support in Tiger
Aug 04, '05 08:59:00AM
Contributed by: moritzh
This 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...
- Reading from NTFS disks seems to be very stable now in 10.4.1+. See the bottom of this hint if you are interested in what kind of issues I had using 10.3.8 which were resolved in 10.4.1.
- Writing to NTFS disks still isn't possible; all NTFS disks are mounted "read only."
- It is possible to transform a disk with NTFS into a Mac disk with HFS+ format. This hint mentions it is possible with Disk Utiliy, but only after initial unmounting. I can't remember for sure (although I did it just a few minutes ago), but I think you don't need to do manual unmounting in 10.4.1 any more; Disk Utility will do it for you. So the user experience is now like with formatting in any other format.
- It is not possible, not even in 10.4.1, to create an NTFS partition or disk. If you want an NTFS disk, you have to do the formatting on a Windows machine. At least, it's not possible using the GUI; maybe it can be done using diskutil in the Terminal. I didn't look for it, but I very much doubt it and would strongly discourage you from trying it if you are somewhat interested in your files' integrity.
- If you want a disk format that can be read both by a Macintosh and a Windows PC, basically the only option is formatting the drive in FAT32 (sometimes also referred to as "MS-DOS" format). FAT32, however, is not suitable as a format for the boot volume of your Mac computer. For Mac use, FAT32 is really rather limited and I recommend using it only on an external hard drive, which would then allow easy exchange of files between the platforms. If you have a network, this is another method of exchanging files, but setting up the correct network configurations and making the different systems talk to each other may be difficult for unexperienced users.
- If you don't want to (or can't) format the whole drive to MS-DOS format (like when you need to install Mac OS X on it), you may want to create both a Mac (HFS+) and a Windows (MS-DOS) partition on it. This hint deals with this topic. There are many, many comments ... if you don't want to read them all, I posted a longer comment about an improved version on Jan 12, 2004 allowing an MS-DOS partitition to be used by Windows and Mac computers and an HFS+ partition to be used by a Mac computer. However, this had the drawback that it was not possible to boot the Mac from the HFS+ partition. More than a year later, on Apr 15, 2005, silentaccord (using ideas from simoncha) posted a solution which allowed the HFS+ partition to be bootable as well. Make sure you read the most recent comments, though, as all this is a bit experimental and definitely for the advaced users who have experience using the command line.
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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