imacken Posted October 15, 2009 Share Posted October 15, 2009 Well, is it safe? Either in OS X or in Fusion to read and write to Windows partitions? I only wonder as I'm getting a few chkdsk requests on W7 boot-ups which I had never seen before the Hackintosh days! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
srs5694 Posted October 15, 2009 Share Posted October 15, 2009 AFAIK, FAT support in OS X is quite mature and safe, so if you've got FAT partitions for data exchange, using them is safe. NTFS support is another matter. My understanding is that 10.6 provides read-only NTFS support by default. There's a way to enable read/write support, but it's reportedly quite buggy and unsafe. Two third-party alternatives, NTFS-3g and Paragon NTFS, also provide read/write NTFS support. They seem to be better than the read/write support provided (but disabled) by Apple, but I'm not sure I'd call either of them completely safe. Unless you need to share big files (bigger than the 4GB limit of FAT), a separate FAT partition for file exchange is the way to go. If you need to share such big files, then your best bet is to use a separate partition using another filesystem -- NTFS or perhaps HFS+ with read/write HFS+ drivers in Windows. (I believe such drivers exist, but I don't know much about them.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imacken Posted October 15, 2009 Author Share Posted October 15, 2009 AFAIK, FAT support in OS X is quite mature and safe, so if you've got FAT partitions for data exchange, using them is safe. NTFS support is another matter. My understanding is that 10.6 provides read-only NTFS support by default. There's a way to enable read/write support, but it's reportedly quite buggy and unsafe. Two third-party alternatives, NTFS-3g and Paragon NTFS, also provide read/write NTFS support. They seem to be better than the read/write support provided (but disabled) by Apple, but I'm not sure I'd call either of them completely safe. Unless you need to share big files (bigger than the 4GB limit of FAT), a separate FAT partition for file exchange is the way to go. If you need to share such big files, then your best bet is to use a separate partition using another filesystem -- NTFS or perhaps HFS+ with read/write HFS+ drivers in Windows. (I believe such drivers exist, but I don't know much about them.) OK, thanks. I guess you've sort of answered my question. I enabled write support on the NTFS drives and maybe that is causing problems. For example, I have been reading and writing Office files to the NTFS drives. What about Fusion? Is it OK to read/write files to NTFS drives in its virtual drives, or is that still a problem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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