external drive share between Mac & Windows

[viodea]

I have a 500GB external drive hooked up to my Windows box. It's been doing fine until I got a MacBook. I used NTFS file system to format my external drive. Now, I can't copy file over from my MacBook. I've heard the FAT32 file system have a pretty small partition size limit. What is the best way to let me both read from and write to the external drive from both Mac & Windows?

Using my linux box as a file server is a though but I'm still doing research on it and won't be done in anytime soon. I need something easy and fast.... if possible :D


thanks

[Jon]

Using it as a shared drive on (any) one of your computers will be the best approach.

[viodea]

that's my next plan if can't find a way around direct connection.
It's a little slower to transfer file across a slow network (100mbps only)... and I use wireless mostly which is even slower :(

[Jon]

IIRC the primary FAT32 limit's the file size of 4 GB; with XP you can only format a partition out to 32 GB, but if you've got a W98 or thereabouts boot/utility floppy set you can make and format a larger partition to the 2 TB limit. And that's transferable among the systems.

[Kagemaru]

Wow I ran into the exact same problem last night.

I pulled one of the drives out of my PC and put it into an external enclosure. I then connected it via USB to my my mac but it won't recognize it. A message pops up that says " The drive is not compatible..." it then gives me the option to "initialize", "cancel" or "eject". What will happen if I initialize it? Will it format or delete the data?

Any help would be appreciated.

[kaitanium]

get a windows 98 computer. it will be able to format more than the paltry 29gb or whatever it is XP can on FAT32
otherwise youll need to partition multiple sectors on that same drive and MAKE SURE YOU EJECT the device. never pull it out without doing so because if you do everything becomes corrupt. i had that happen with my lacie 160gb drive that i was passing back and forth between a pc and mac

[viodea]

I guess I'll just share it for now and use a NFS when I finish my research and Giga-bit network upgrade.

[purelithium]

Format it on your MacBook with Disk Utility, and buy/use MacDrive on your windows PC to read/write to it like any other drive.

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

This is an essential tool for me, as I do sometimes need to use my HFS formatted drives on my old windows PC. the HFS+(Mac File system) allows files greater than 4gb, and with macdrive, you can use it on all your computers, as long as you have it installed on the windows computer.

[purelithium]

OR, try this. It should work. It's a way to make an NTFS drive a FUSE drive( Filesystem in User SpacE). So you can' read/write to it like any other drive on your MacBook

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html

EDIT: Whoops... meant to edit this into the other post...

[viodea]

OR, try this. It should work. It's a way to make an NTFS drive a FUSE drive( Filesystem in User SpacE). So you can' read/write to it like any other drive on your MacBook

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html

EDIT: Whoops... meant to edit this into the other post...

have you used it? How stable is it?
I always worry stablilty when install something that low-level.

Do I use Finder to do all my read & write or I need to use some kind of program comes with FUSE? Is it all transparent to me?


thanks

[purelithium]

The beauty of using the BSD(Darwin) core for OSX is that there will never be any effects to main system services that will disrupt your computer's operation. Unix makes things so compartmentalized, it's really quite hard to damage the entire system by installing something like this.

I DO use MacFUSE, as it allows me to mount FTP servers as local drives so I can read/write files to them from within finder, and it makes things "transparent" as you say. It really makes uploading and downloading files to my website so easy.

So yes, it is stable, and you will use the mounted drive as you would any other drive on your computer, with finder.

The only troublesome part of it will be the installation, if you're not confident about using the terminal. The best way to go about it, will probably be to copy and paste the commands in italics from the website directly into the Terminal shell.

Let me know how it works out.

[Sathi]

Setting up that drive as NTFS off your linux box is going to be your best/easiest/fastest option.

I ran into this exact same problem 6 months ago when I bought a 500G external. I have a linux setup at home but the reason I got an external is so I can sneaker net files with friends and such and most of the world uses windows. Fat32 wasn't an option for obvious reasons. After a little research I discovered the ntfs-3g driver which was still in beta at the time and let you write to ntfs. I used it with zero problems and just recently version 1.0 came out so it is no longer beta and really does work well.

Check out how easy it is in the newest ubuntu release. It is a 2 click operation:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/widows-ntfs-partitions-readwrite-support-made-easy-in-ubuntu-feisty.html

I do not know much about macs but it is my understanding that you can get almost anything that runs on linux to run on a mac. If the mac can indeed already make use of FUSE as purelithium pointed out then you are golden, as that is how the ntfs-3g operates on linux. If you need any assistance with this just let me know, I would be happy to help you out.

[viodea]

The beauty of using the BSD(Darwin) core for OSX is that there will never be any effects to main system services that will disrupt your computer's operation. Unix makes things so compartmentalized, it's really quite hard to damage the entire system by installing something like this.

I DO use MacFUSE, as it allows me to mount FTP servers as local drives so I can read/write files to them from within finder, and it makes things "transparent" as you say. It really makes uploading and downloading files to my website so easy.

So yes, it is stable, and you will use the mounted drive as you would any other drive on your computer, with finder.

The only troublesome part of it will be the installation, if you're not confident about using the terminal. The best way to go about it, will probably be to copy and paste the commands in italics from the website directly into the Terminal shell.

Let me know how it works out.

Sounds good. Can I reverse/uninstall MacFUSE? I've been using command line for quite some times but not expert. I only know some basic stuff needed to survive. I'm still in the process of rebuilding my server after HD died :(

[viodea]

Setting up that drive as NTFS off your linux box is going to be your best/easiest/fastest option.

I ran into this exact same problem 6 months ago when I bought a 500G external. I have a linux setup at home but the reason I got an external is so I can sneaker net files with friends and such and most of the world uses windows. Fat32 wasn't an option for obvious reasons. After a little research I discovered the ntfs-3g driver which was still in beta at the time and let you write to ntfs. I used it with zero problems and just recently version 1.0 came out so it is no longer beta and really does work well.

Check out how easy it is in the newest ubuntu release. It is a 2 click operation:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/widows-ntfs-partitions-readwrite-support-made-easy-in-ubuntu-feisty.html

I do not know much about macs but it is my understanding that you can get almost anything that runs on linux to run on a mac. If the mac can indeed already make use of FUSE as purelithium pointed out then you are golden, as that is how the ntfs-3g operates on linux. If you need any assistance with this just let me know, I would be happy to help you out.

too bad I'm runing Debian without X... so, it's more than just 2 clicks for me :( It's still good though... at least I know what to look for :D

[Savagebasher]

mount -t ntfs /dev/drive /mnt/point

[René Damkot]

What will happen if I initialize it? Will it format or delete the data?

In effect: Yep.

[Johan007]

Backup your files then just reformat NTFS as FAT32 and it will work for both Mac + PC.

p.s. Always use NTFS on your PC's own hard drive becuase FAT32 is slower.

[viodea]

Is NTFS file system already supported by Dibian? It's great if that's the case.

[purelithium]

Is NTFS file system already supported by Dibian? It's great if that's the case.

No, unfortunately it's in the same boat as most other *NIX based operating systems--Read Only.

You can uninstall MacFUSE, it's mostly just an application, it's made by Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

Here's a GUI version of it, but I think It only supports FTP and SSH volumes, unfortunately: http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/mgorbach/MacFusionWeb/

[Sathi]

too bad I'm runing Debian without X... so, it's more than just 2 clicks for me :( It's still good though... at least I know what to look for :D

Debian supports ntfs write support no problem. FTA:

On July 14th, Szakacsits Szabolcs, a developer for the Linux-NTFS project published a major update of the Linux NTFS driver. It is now possible to write to an NTFS partition in a safe manner.

I've tested it for months now and I have yet to report any issue. In fact, I have had more troubles with the old NTFS driver which allowed read-only operations on NTFS partitions. On February 21th, 2007, the first stable release of NTFS-3G was released as version 1.0.


FYI Ubuntu is Debian based.
Having no X makes this even easier. Just copy and paste in the following commands to the terminal:

If Debian Etch

wget http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2007/03/01/debian/pool/main/n/ntfs-3g/libntfs-3g0_0.0.0+20061031-6_i386.deb
wget http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2007/03/01/debian/pool/main/n/ntfs-3g/ntfs-3g_0.0.0+20061031-6_i386.deb

Then:

sudo apt-get install fuse-utils libfuse2

Finally:

sudo dpkg -i libntfs-3g0_0.0.0+20061031-6_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i ntfs-3g_0.0.0+20061031-6_i386.deb


If Debian SID

Even easier just type:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g


To mount your partition:

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows -o umask=0,nls=utf8

To make that permenant on bootup you can put it in /etc/fstab as such:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/windows ntfs-3g umask=0,nls=utf8 0 0

You unmount in the standard way with:

sudo umount /dev/sda1

Tip:

The output of

sudo fdisk -l | grep -i ntfs

will tell you the location of your windows partition.

In case it is not obvious you will replace /dev/hda1 and /mnt/windows with whatever your
particular drive location and mount point is.

You can get detailed instructions here:
http://technowizah.com/2006/11/debian-how-to-writing-to-ntfs.html

This will work on ANY linux distribution. If your distro doesn't have
a precompiled package you can easily compile it yourself from the sourcecode off of the FUSE and ntfs-3g websites.

Just want to mention that MacFuse lets you run a file system in userspace. After you install that you will STILL need to install ntfs-3g in order to have write support. The methods for installing this on a Mac seems to be almost identical to installing it on linux so once you do one you should be able to do the other one wihtout too much hassle.

This has been working great for me for months even when I was using the beta driver. My windows boot can read/write with no
problem and when I brought my drive to my friend's house his Mac was able to read the files without issue. You can read up on
the extensive testing that has been done on the driver here:

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/quality.html

Good luck!

[purelithium]

Oh Sathi, you're right! I thought the OP was asking if Debian supported NTFS natively. the NTFS-3g driver is what's being used with MacFUSE, too so it's all the same, I suppose.

[viodea]

Oh Sathi, you're right! I thought the OP was asking if Debian supported NTFS natively. the NTFS-3g driver is what's being used with MacFUSE, too so it's all the same, I suppose.

You are right. That's what I meant. I guess it doesn't really matter whether it supports NTFS natively or driver needed as long as I can and know how to do it.

Thank you all. This forum is amazing. I would never thought getting Linux help from a photography forum... ha ha...

[viodea]

I installed MacFuse but not sure how to mount a NTFS USB drive with write access.
Can someone tells me how to do it?

thanks
Andy

[viodea]

I think I know what the problem is. I only installed the MacFUSE but not the ntfs-3g driver. I have problem finding a driver dmg file for mac though. I installed one but seemed it didn't do anything though :(

[gjman]

......... I've heard the FAT32 file system have a pretty small partition size limit. What is the best way to let me both read from and write to the external drive from both Mac & Windows?


http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

I donno MAC stuff but if you want to format ANY SIZED drive to FAT32 use the method described above. I have personally done 500GB and 120GB drives.