NTFS and MAC

[Hotwired]

Ok, I finally decided to go with Mac and OS X. I'm even dumping my entire Rig, or what's left of it, my laptop, and some few other misc. electronics. However, I am still using the hard drives from my Windows XP system. I have a Maxtor 120gb 8mb 7200rpm drive and a WD1200jb 120gb 8mb 7200 rpm drive in my XP system. Both are NTFS drives created by Windows.

What I have read for OS X is that only FAT32 is readable/writable. Due to the file security system that NTFS incorportates, OS X cannot access NTFS. Is there any 3rd party software out there that allows such compatibililty? I've enjoyed such stability and data security with NTFS compared to my previous experiences with FAT/32 and Win98. Or do I just have to convert my NTFS drives back to a singular FAT32 partition? I've also heard that OS X does not recognize more than one partition per physical hard drive. I plan to use Powerquest's Parition Magic 8.0 to convert the drive.


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[Dim]

I don't know about multiple fat32 partitions, but OS X does support multiple Mac partitions on a single drive.

 

[Vadatajs]

Why would you want NTFS on macos? AFAIK, you'll have to repartition all of you hard drives. I don't know if they still do it, but ususally, there are 4 small partitions that contain god-knows-what on a mac, probably disk drivers or something. Then again, most of my mac experience involves installing debian over OS9 as the primary os.

 

[Hotwired]

Are talking about OS X and HFS+ or the older MFS and HFS? I'm a Mac newbie but a Windose...hehe...starting to pick up the lingo now...user for the last 6-8 years. I'm actually shipping my system RAM from my XP system t/m morning so I need to know soon!

 

[Vadatajs]

Originally posted by: Hotwired
Are talking about OS X and HFS+ or the older MFS and HFS? I'm a Mac newbie but a Windose...hehe...starting to pick up the lingo now...user for the last 6-8 years. I'm actually shipping my system RAM from my XP system t/m morning so I need to know soon!

No, I'm wondering why you'd even want to try using NTFS on a mac. It's not like any of your windows programs will work, so you might as well just let the disk utility set up the drive for you. If you have files you need, you're better off just burning them to cd. If you don't know anything about macs, working with them is absolute hell. They are totally different from pc's, so whatever pc hardware/os knowledge you have doesn't really apply.

 

[Ichinisan]

From what I hear, the current Macintosh file system is comparable to NTFS (rather than FAT32, although it can still access FAT32 also).

 

[Hotwired]

I've successfully converted one of my drives completely over to FAT32...:: i'm scared of all the quirky stability problems with FAT32 and well...one of the partitions now has data read errors....there was already a few lost data sectors when Partition Magic 8.0 did it's data check-up. But those 'saved to file' had 0 bytes so I assumed they were free sectors and harmless. However, when I checked to open up some pictures I took back in school, only 25-35% actually could open up! Mp3s and music videos I could download again, but personal data....OMG. Thank goodness it's only multimedia and all my documents are on another physical drive.

I'm thinking I should immediately bring my HDs over to a friend's and copy my both of my 120gb HDs over to his and reformat the drives as HFS+ [MAC's File System] since I won't be lugging my 2-bay enclosure case around too much. I figure that's what my 2.5" firewire/usb2.0 20gb external drive would be useful for....i hope.

Now for data recovery....here we go again...back when I had an IBM Deskstar 75GXP...my 75gb...completely failed...was able to extract a few files here after like 3 weeks and there using some 3rd party software. But for something like this, is there anyway I can fix this? Also how can I format a HD as HFS+ w/o the OS X software?

 

[drag]

geeze louis, you got a lot of stuff to back up, eh?

I suppose the absolute easiest way to do this sort of thing is to get your freinds windows kit and get your Mac OS X computer. Set them up on a little peer to peer lan and set up file sharing, then just copy one harddrive over using SMB (windows file and sharing), then put that HD in the MAC, format it, and copy that HD over to the newly formatted 120G HD, then stick the second 120 G hd in there and then you are all set...

Geez that's a lot of stuff. Though...

You know what I would do if I were you and had all that info you needed to access all the time? Set up a el' cheapo computer (pentium 2 and above) (hey check out www.mini-itx.com for those neato itx mainboards) and stick a minimal linux installation on it, and just use that as a simple file sharer, put a nice cd burner in it and then you can make backups galor on it. If you want good data protection, just stick a cheapo UPS on it and put it in a closet or in the basement or something. Eventually you can get a 3rd 120 meg hd and maybe a raid card and set that up. You can leave it running 24/7 with no monitor or anything and SSH to it from the MAC's built-in terminal if you need to move files around. Linux can read NTFS formats so you can easily copy stuff from your old HD's. Linux has some very robust file formats like xfs, reiserfs, ext3 to choose from that are superior to window's ntfs and such (I am sure their are several people here that know more about the specifics formats +'s and -'s then me).

Hell if you realy want to get into it you can set up nfs shares on the linux box and make it part of your MAC's file directory so that it will be a seemless intagration. It would act like you never left your own harddrive.

 

[Hotwired]

I don't know if anyone out there has one, but I think a NAS enclosure would do me better? Do I need an XP OS to read from the NTFS drives to use w/ an iBook and OS X?

 

[drag]

If you want to read AND write using NTFS you;ll have to go with windows or another commercail product. Linux and Macs can READ from NTFS, but that's it, they can't write.(linux can be MADE to write, but it's not safe and normally it won't let you),

(by NAS, I assume you ment network attacted storage device -a fancy name for a file server, thats it, mostly)
What I described to you in my second paragraph is a Linux NAS that you can build yourself. If you want XP will probably work, but Linux will be better due to performance and stability reasons and the fact that it is more compatable with OS X then XP is. But for what your doing XP will probably work just fine, no problem. W2k probably a bit better.

The only thing to worry about is that Macs have a weird filing method were there information is composed of to parts, one is the data part and the other is the information about icons and position in the windows and stuff like that. Now in HFS+ it is alright that is native behavior, but in another file format like ext2 or fat32 the file is divided intor 2 files. One is the normal data part -the important part; the part you care about, and the other is just the extra folder information part. The important part is the actual file itself, and the other is a file by the same name but preceded with a dot-underscore "._" and are hidden. The ._ files can be deleted with no problem (you may want to double check this) but they can accumilate and make it annoying because they need to be cleaned up all the time.. Plus in windows sometimes you will get file-names you can't remove and can be annoying, but they don't hurt anything.

 

[Hotwired]

Hah, well I figure I'm not gonna buy myself a Maxtor or Quantum Snap File Server. I could build myself a small server for much cheaper but it would be much bigger in size and consumer more watt power. LOL.

Well two things then. I'm really interested in using a Linux box or even a Windows 2k3 server. I want a dual-bay hard drive enclosure that can provide remote access via firewire, ethernet, internet, etc. and accessbility to mainly Windows, Mac, and Linux if needed. However, I don't have any background experiences to servers watsoever. Seems like Linux has the most realiability and stability compared to Windows but even then, I have no know of using Linux. I've heard of GUIs for Linux but ::sigh:: where do I start? HOW DO I MINIMIZE THE LEARNING CURVE? I'm switching over to Mac for the sake of simplicity and realiability...no more BSODs.

 

[drag]

Places like this and www.tldp.org Especially for linux you can find out pretty much everything on the internet. Linux is completely internet based OS and it's developement is dependant completely on it, so you can find all sorts of documents about everything you'd want to know. Lots of howtos about everything. Simple 3 or 4 pages on how dos commands relate to bash commands. Documentation of everything from moving and coping files to advanced topics like kernel hacking. The hardest part is shifting thru all that info. Google is your freind.

It's pretty simple actually. The 2 most things you may have to worry about the most is security and your own newb-ness. If you have a simple dsl router or something like that and you aren't planning on file sharing out into the internet you have security covered. As far as your own newb-ness you may destroy a couple installs until you figure out what to do and how to do it somewhat correctly.

In order to set up file sharing in Windows, of course it's pretty simple you just enable windows file and print sharing services and set which files you want to share. Mac's can login to windows share easily. So you have a folder that has all your mp3's, just share that folder and you can hit apple-k and loggin to it and it will show up on your Mac desktop as a little planet icon. You may need to install a little program called the Microsoft UAM (user authintification module) to deal with window's security stuff and that's about it. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do those things.

In linux you have several choices, probably one of the older and quiker protocals is called NFS. It's pretty advanced, but it's small and fast and you can mount (make part of directory) those nfs as part of you Mac directory instead of having little network share icons on you desktop. Probably the easiest is to use Samba, which is a program that uses the SMB protocal, which is used by MS to share files, too. It's a bit bigger, but more modern and used quite a bit for this sort of thing.

Probably the best way to start linux is get a Redhat CD and isntall it on kinda older hardware. Don't go out and buy like a brand new nforce2 motherboard and nice brand new ati card, you will have problems because they are just so new. Anyways that sort of thing is just overkilll for this sort of thing. Linux can make a great file sharer with 486-era hardware for just a home lan, windows works good with what ever hardware you can run it on. I'd probably get a AMD k7 or pentium 2/3 era computer with a older gforce2 card or even more generic/just what you have laying around, stick a 128 megs of RAM in it and that should be fine. Maybe the Gui would be a little bit slow or whatnot, but you don't need speed for this application, the main limitation is harddrive output/input. Get a older monitor to put on it. Sit the old box down next to your main desktop and then install linux/windows on it and look up webpages on you nice one and follow the directions. THat way you can experiment with differnet setting and you don't have to worry about rebooting all the time or having ton of printouts to be able to follow the directions or troubleshoot if something goes wrong.