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I am wondering if OSX will ever be able to read and write to NTFS partitions. I think that would really solve it for me. Right now, I am kind of miffed, because I can either have what I feel is a crippled file system (FAT32) or a secure one that isn't OSX compatible. I'd really like to be able to bridge the gap between OSX and NTFS/XP. I know of (and use) MacDrive for XP, but it's really not reliable enough to be used day-to-day. What do you think?

 

Dan

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Linux-NTFS (http://www.linux-ntfs.org/) says that writing is about 50-50%:

 

Resize files. (Always work.)

Create files. (This will either succeed or it will be refused, 50-50% at the moment. Up to about 10 files can be created in a directory.)

Create directories. (Same as above.)

Remove files/directories (Works fine or removal will be refused, 90-10% at the moment.)

Operate with special Interix files (symlinks, devices, FIFOs and sockets.)

MacDrive has nothing to do with NTFS. MacDrive tells Windows how to read/write the Mac's HFS+ file system. Apple published specs on HFS+. Microsoft hasn't published specs on writing NTFS.

 

I realize this. I said is there a program out there "like MacDrive". What I meant was if there was a similar style program intended for Mac allowing for NTFS.

OS X does have a very limited comand-line-only write support for NTFS

It's derivated from the linux ntfs driver, used in OS X normally for reading that partition type.

 

 

And folks, I don't know how many threads just like this are in the forum, but are a lot. If you have a question search a bit and if you dont find it, then ask.

The source code for ntfs is closed ant there is little to no chance that Microsoft will ever open it. This means that there will never be a fully compatable 3rd party solution like MacDrive. The current Linux NTFS write support is realized by reverse enginering microsoft code leading to the current stabolity and featureset issues. Another method exists through a project called captive (http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/) which uses windows NTFS drivers by emulating part of the windows OS giving full NTFS read/write support and probably other features not provided by reverse-engineered drivers. I've never used captive but I would assume the method might have some performance issues due to the implementation of an API wrapper. Porting Captive to OSX looks like the best solution to getting full interoperability between Windows and Mac filesystems, let's hope one of the coders here can wrangle the time to get it working.

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