Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Snow Leopard and NTFS

This episode came out of me recovering data from my Daughter's Linux installation.  I'd been thinking of getting her an iMac for Christmas, and damn if her Lenny machine didn't agree.  First, it wouldn't boot, and then there were multiple disk errors .... mayday!

Because of the limitations of the failing file system, I copied the data onto an ext2 formatted disk.  I copied the data onto a storage drive on another system and then set about finding how I could transfer the data to a Snow Leopard Mac.

To cut a long story short, I found that an external ntfs drive had to be formatted from a Microsoft system to be recognised by the Mac.  Linux has a number of ntfs tools (easily installed in Debian) that enable an ntfs drive to be writeable by Linux.

From there, it is easy ..... write the data to the external drive and then copy it to the Mac.  Snow Leopard has native ntfs READ capability.  (It has native write capability, but this is hidden).

Some places to look ....

http://www.ntfsmounter.com/
http://www.tuxera.com/community/release-history/
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=785376
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Update 29Dec 2010

I downloaded the ntfs-3g driver from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/NTFS-3G%20for%20Mac%20OS%20X

Installed fine.

:)

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