Tom Grant Posted October 9, 2008 Share Posted October 9, 2008 I have a friend with a Macbook running OS X 10.5.4 at that is having some real flaky problems with external drives. I don't quite know what the source of the problem is, but I want to say that this started occurring once he upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Sometime previous to his upgrade to Leopard I made an attempt to get full NTFS support with MacFuse. As I am not entirely well versed in OS X and how things work, and due to limited time with his laptop - I never did get it fully operational. With the background out of the way, onto the problem. The drive I'm using for this exercise was formatted NTFS on a Windows Vista PC. For reference, this drive is labeled/named "music". I have previously used this drive on this Macbook without problems in the past. I plug the drive in, it does not create an icon on the desktop. I open the disk utility and I see the following. I first clicked on "Verify Disk", received the error. Then, I clicked on "Repair Disk", again I receive the error. Notice that the label of the partition is incorrect. It's named "-n music" rather than just "music". Also, notice the red and white minus symbol on the partition. So I double click on the mount point "/Volumes/-n music", at the bottom. And the following opens: Again, you will notice the red and white minus symbol. I double click on the folder for the mount point in the list and receive the shown error message. So I go back to the disk utility and try to unmount the drive, but receive the following error message: I've got limited unix knowledge and can easily work my way through a command prompt with instructions. So I search Google on this problem for hours on end trying all sorts of things with absolutely no luck. What I did was went to the terminal and made an attempt to change the permissions on the mount point when I saw they were all jacked up. I also pulled up information for the operating system drive as well as a working USB drive that I have had plugged in. Once I manually changed the permissions and ownership, I went back to the disk utility. As you can see, the red and white minus symbol is now gone, but I am still unable to verify or repair the disk. Once again, I double click on the mount point, at the bottom. And I get the Volumes window again. This time I am able to enter the folder for the mount point "-n music", but it shows empty. I've been able to delete all unused mount points when drives were not attached. But once I re-attach, they are re-created and are still not functional the way they should be. This one REALLY perplexes me and I'm surprised I haven't been able to figure it out yet with the amount of time I've put into it. I don't know who or what to blame here, but I want to resolve it. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dies Posted October 9, 2008 Share Posted October 9, 2008 You cant "verify" or "repair" NTFS volumes from anything but Windows using check disk, at least not yet. Tools to check NTFS are "in the works" but haven't been implemented yet. The most you can do is flag the volume as dirty so that Windows will check it next time you boot. Speaking of "dirty", if the volume wasn't properly unmounted last time it was used, NTFS-3G will not mount it unless you --force it to which is not a good idea, are you sure the drive wasn't just unplugged last time it was used instead of safely ejecting it? Another thing to consider is formatting the drive using XP or better yet something like http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php yeah, I realize that if you have data on it that can be a PITA to move stuff around, but I have to wonder if the way Vista formats a drive isn't different than other programs. Not sure what you mean when you say you couldn't get read/write working? It really is pretty simple First download http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ double-click to install, reboot if it tells you to, then grab http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ the stable version and double-click to install that, reboot and it should "just work". Hope some of that helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom Grant Posted October 9, 2008 Author Share Posted October 9, 2008 You cant "verify" or "repair" NTFS volumes from anything but Windows using check disk, at least not yet. Tools to check NTFS are "in the works" but haven't been implemented yet. The most you can do is flag the volume as dirty so that Windows will check it next time you boot. No? My friend has a Western Digital "My Book", which you can see shown in the screenshots I listed. It was formatted in NTFS. It also was having similar problems, however a "Repair Disk" is what took care of it's issues. And that was after I upgraded to the most recent version of MacFuse even. Originally it was tellling me the version of MacFuse was too new for the operating system and to downgrade. Once I upgraded (going to the link you already provided), re-inserted his drive I was no longer seeing that message. Then performed the repair and it became readable again. But currently it's not writable. See my comment below for further details. Speaking of "dirty", if the volume wasn't properly unmounted last time it was used, NTFS-3G will not mount it unless you --force it to which is not a good idea, are you sure the drive wasn't just unplugged last time it was used instead of safely ejecting it? It's entirely possible. I am used to being able to just pull the drive out from a Windows-based system without the extra "eject". Another thing to consider is formatting the drive using XP or better yet something like http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php yeah, I realize that if you have data on it that can be a PITA to move stuff around, but I have to wonder if the way Vista formats a drive isn't different than other programs. I really don't have access to XP anymore. I used Vista on my two machines. I don't know why it would format any differently, but who the hell knows with Microsoft. Not sure what you mean when you say you couldn't get read/write working? It really is pretty simple First download http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ double-click to install, reboot if it tells you to, then grab http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ the stable version and double-click to install that, reboot and it should "just work". Hope some of that helps. I've already got the latest version of MacFuse installed. I believe I did install (or tried) MacNTFS-3G. However, I thought I had some problems with it when I did. It has been months as I don't always have access to the Macbook. I will have to try again I guess when I see it next. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dies Posted October 9, 2008 Share Posted October 9, 2008 No? My friend has a Western Digital "My Book", which you can see shown in the screenshots I listed. It was formatted in NTFS. It also was having similar problems, however a "Repair Disk" is what took care of it's issues. Nope. In any case, it's good that it helped with whatever problems you were having, but I don't see how it could have done anything as far as consistency checking goes. Not unless you're using some commercial solution like Paragon, I think that's the only driver that includes a tool to actually check ntfs. But I've never used it so... As far as the format suggestion, yeah not sure why there would be a difference in the way Vista handles this, but then I've seen some DVD's burned with Vista that can't be read by other OS'es. Also I still suggest grabbing that liveCD, at a minimum it would show you whether the problem is with OS X or with the drive/partition since it uses NTFS-3G too. Well, best of luck. Oh yeah, BTW this is an important thing to keep in mind if nothing else pans out. Sometimes your first instinct is right on. I don't quite know what the source of the problem is, but I want to say that this started occurring once he upgraded from Tiger to Leopard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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