Writing to NTFS partitions using Leopard

3. May 2009 in Apple, MacOS | No comments

(I tagged this posting without the Delphi-flag which DelphiFeeds.com should note, if it is being aggregated there still, please drop me a line. This is not intended as this clearly is not related to Delphi programming)

The first question one might pose is why one would want to write to NTFS having a Mac. Well, simple. I still do a lot of work on Windows systems and if I want to create files bigger than 2 (or is it 4?) GB, I cannot use any FAT derivative which can be used with Mac. Windows cannot read the Mac file systems either. Furthermore, I used Windows exclusively, so all my harddrives I used for backing up contain NTFS partitions with huge disk images. I cannot write any files to these partitions with a default Leopard install.

Today, I found a project called “MacFuse”. It is a developer SDK/API of some sort that allows you to develop 3rd party file-system support. Of course, there already exists an implementation for NTFS. The one I found is called “NTFS-3G” written by Erik Larsson.

In case you want to write to NTFS partitions as well, the following links will help you to get started. Please note that the latest release of  NTFS-3G does not require the installation of MacFuse as it comes “in the package” as well.

  • MacFuse: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
  • NTFS-3G: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/