ntfs posts

My Dad, the Switcher: Day 140

by Robert Palmer (RSS feed) on Mar 13th, 2009

Yesterday, Robert talked about setting up a new Mac Pro for his switcher Dad. Today, setting up Windows proves to be a bit of a headache.

When I mentioned to my best buddy Cameron that Dad was getting a Mac Pro to replace his just-months-old Mac mini, he said "Wow. He sure moves quickly when it comes to toys!"

That he does. Just three or four months ago, he had bought his Mac mini. Now here we were, installing Windows on his tricked-out refurb Mac Pro.

This was proving to be a problem. For me, mostly.

He wanted to install Windows XP Service Pack 2, which, as far as we knew, would work fine. We started Boot Camp Assistant, and printed out the instructions. We had a whole 750GB hard disk to give to Windows, so we chose it and were restarting into that purgatory of Windows Setup in DOSville.

After loading its various components ("Human Interface Parser" was our favorite), Windows Setup displayed the volumes available to install Windows, but our newly-created Boot Camp partition wasn't listed. Uh oh.

Continue reading “My Dad, the Switcher: Day 140”

Tags: dad, fat32, features, mac pro, macfuse, MacMini, MacPro, mydadtheswitcher, ntfs, parallels, switcher, windows

Filed under: Enterprise, Software, Switchers

NTFSready cleans up your filename act

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Jan 30th, 2008

One of my intermittent day-job responsibilities is to move big chunks of data (20 GB or more in a session) from the friendly, forgiving, name-your-files-whatever-you-want confines of a Mac OS X server onto cranky, finicky, no-funky-characters (but portable) NAS devices so that the data can travel with a production team to some far-away city. This is generally a straightforward and simple task, except for one annoying fact: illegal characters, as SMB or NTFS define them, in file or folder names can bring those massive copies to a screeching halt. Major buzzkill!

There are a few ways to clean up filenames to make them legal for transfer; I've used both FileBuddy and A Better Finder Rename with success, and ABFR even has an "NTFS legal" preset for quick action. For a single-purpose tool, though, there's now NTFSready, This 10-euro donationware tool will hunt through your files and folders for illegal characters, nuke them, and that's about all there is. Is it worth it? Well, if you need to rename files for NTFS use on an everyday basis, maybe. At 10 euro, though, I'd say you're better off paying the $19.95 for ABFR and getting the flexibility that comes with it.

Tags: file management, FileManagement, ntfs

Filed under: Software, Switchers

NTFS on your Mac two ways

by Michael Rose (RSS feed) on Nov 19th, 2007

PC-to-Mac switchers are sometimes surprised to discover that while Mac OS X has full support for reading, writing and formatting the older FAT32 Windows disk format, media formatted with the NTFS scheme (NT for "New Technology" a la Windows NT, FS for File System -- introduced in 1993, not so 'new' anymore...) mounts as read-only on the Mac.

Even though there are valid technical reasons for keeping the NTFS drives read-only -- for one thing, the NTFS format is a Microsoft trade secret and must be licensed for full compatibility -- this constraint may cause challenges for cross-platform operations or Boot Camp users who choose NTFS for their drives. Without a separate FAT32 volume or a Windows-side utility like MacDrive, transferring files can be a pain.

Enter the new release from Paragon, NTFS for Mac OS X 6.0, meant to overcome this limitation. Paragon has sold a Linux NTFS driver for some time now, but this is the first version of the tool for Mac OS X. For $29.95, you get a driver compatible with 10.4.6 and up which works on both PPC and Intel Macs (why version 6 for a new product? It's tracking the version of the Linux utility, also at v6). You can download a 10-day trial here.

The primary selling point of Paragon's tool is speed and compatibility, when compared to the option behind door number 2: MacFUSE/ntfs-3g, the Google implementation of the FUSE library for Mac OS X paired with the open-source build of NTFS support (now stable after 12 years of development!). After a change of developers on the Mac build of ntfs-3g earlier in the year, the package is now tracking along nicely and all indications are that the combination of MacFUSE and ntfs-3g works well, albeit more slowly than would be ideal. If you have occasional need for NTFS writeability, MacFUSE might do the job; if you'll need it every day, check out Paragon's tool. If you only need to drag and drop to an NTFS volume while you're running Parallels or VMware Fusion... well, relax: both virtualization apps provide reciprocal file transfer, and Parallels will even open your disk images on the Mac side as needed, without launching the full Windows environment.

Tags: ntfs

Filed under: Freeware, Open Source, Beta Beat, Developer

Macfuse: FUSE File System for the Mac

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on Jan 11th, 2007

This one is for the real Mac geeks out there. Amit Singh, author or Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, is widely recognized as an über Mac-geek and possibly the person outside of Apple that knows the most about Mac OS X. He is now employed by Google as their Mac Engineering Manager. As he just announced on the Official Google Mac Blog, he used part of his "20 percent time" to implement the "FUSE (File System in User Space) mechanism" for OS X (it was originally developed for Linux). He explains, "FUSE makes it possible to implement a very functional file system in a normal program rather than requiring a complex addition to the operating system." He links to the FUSE project wiki listing of applications. While this won't have an immediate impact on most of us users, it has a lot of potential. As pointed out on MacSlash this may eventually bring full read/write support for Windows NTFS formatted disks to OS X (Mac OS X can read, but not write to, NTFS disks) or even "filesystems which run over ssh and gmail."

[Via the Official Google Mac Blog]

Tags: amit singh, AmitSingh, FUSE, macfuse, ntfs

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