Read/Write to NTFS on external drive with Mac
Sep 04 2008 10:59 PM Filed in: Apple
If you work with both a Windows machine and a Mac,
and you want to hook up a portable drive to both, you
will need to format the drive in a format that both
Windows and Mac can read. Since FAT 32 really sucks,
your best bet is formatting the drive using NTFS. A
Mac can read an NTFS partition, but can’t write to
it. You may also run into issues trying to read from
an external/portable drive that’s formatted in NTFS.
I ran into this today when I used VMWare Converter to convert my work computer into a virtual machine. The resulting VMWare image was around 20GB, not exactly the size file our network folks would like me trying to copy across the network. The easiest way to move such large files is to copy the files to a portable drive. I formatted my portable drive in NTFS and copied the files onto it. When I hooked the external drive to my MacBook I received a read error. To fix this I did the following.
Install MacFUSE. This allows your Mac to use any FUSE (File System in Userspace). Once you download the disc image and install the package, you should download and install the NTFS-3g FUSE. You will need to reboot after the install, (something I haven’t had to do since my Windows days); but after the reboot you should hopefully now encounter no more issues.
I ran into this today when I used VMWare Converter to convert my work computer into a virtual machine. The resulting VMWare image was around 20GB, not exactly the size file our network folks would like me trying to copy across the network. The easiest way to move such large files is to copy the files to a portable drive. I formatted my portable drive in NTFS and copied the files onto it. When I hooked the external drive to my MacBook I received a read error. To fix this I did the following.
Install MacFUSE. This allows your Mac to use any FUSE (File System in Userspace). Once you download the disc image and install the package, you should download and install the NTFS-3g FUSE. You will need to reboot after the install, (something I haven’t had to do since my Windows days); but after the reboot you should hopefully now encounter no more issues.
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