Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X Public Beta Testing

I unistalled Beta 2 this morning. When I unistalled it, my BootCamp partition, which is formatted as NTFS, went away. I could still access it with VM Fusion, but I could not mount it and see it. Under Disk Utility, it didn't show up as normal, it showed up as unmountable unformatted disk.

It went away when I installed Beta 3. I think that's a really weird problem when uninstalling the Beta though.

Anyone else have this issue?

I didn't have any problems uninstalling...

bobtomay said:

In that link, 'mds' in the active processes is Spotlight indexing process.
From what I've found so far, anytime it is running, you're drive is going to be working. The only time I really noticed it that much on my system was when 'mds' was hitting 20%+.

I am not sure - does Spotlight index a Bootcamp NTFS partition normally or not?
Or is this being added by NTFS for Mac?
I just don't recall seeing results show up in my searches prior to installing NTFS for Mac.
Anyone know?

Click to expand...

Well, I could live with Spotlight indexing my drive a bit every so often, but it reads so much that i can't access the NTFS partition at all, as I described, for example when I play an MP3 it stops every 2 seconds for 3 seconds to load, or Quicktime just crashes.

Is there any way to disable this? I haven't run into the problem with Beta 3 yet though, I'll post what happens.

P.S. Yay, the Windows disk now shows up in 'Startup Disk'

Hybernation, Leopard and the future

Dear Anatoly,

Only today have I discovered the existence of this beta. I guess the final product is just about to be released. I've been using NTFS-3G for a few weeks, and I must say I'm most impressed with the Paragon product!

Let me ask a few questions:
- How does your driver behave if one tries to access a hybernated NTFS drive? Will it open it? Does it or will it have some option to non-destructively repair an NTFS drive that won't boot up?
- Will the upcoming NTFS utilities (format, etc.) be fully integrated into the OS X Disk Utility, or will tinkering with Terminal or some external application be necessary?
- Does your driver let OS X create Trash and Desktop hidden folders and .DS_Store, etc., in NTFS drives? If it does, is there a way of keeping OS X from doing that, or is it unadvisable?
- Leopard is rumoured to be around the corner (26 October, they say). Will your final driver be Leopard-compatible? If released before Leopard goes gold, will an update to your driver be Leopard-compatible on the 26th or shortly afterward?

Thank you for an awesome product!
Peter

Anatoly,

I have been reading about this beta for a few days, and finally took the plunge by installing beta 3 this morning. I am sorry to say that so far, I have no bugs to report, and that I've been able to move files back and forth from my MBPro to my NTFS file server very easily.

This makes me a bad beta tester, in that I won't have interesting bugs for you to work out

Thank you! IT ROCKS!
Perry

It all seems fine now with Beta 3, great!

Glad to hear all your issues have cleared up Ge64.

PerryLynch said:

Anatoly,

I have been reading about this beta for a few days, and finally took the plunge by installing beta 3 this morning. I am sorry to say that so far, I have no bugs to report, and that I've been able to move files back and forth from my MBPro to my NTFS file server very easily.

This makes me a bad beta tester, in that I won't have interesting bugs for you to work out

Thank you! IT ROCKS!
Perry

Click to expand...

Perry,

This product provides write capability for locally attached disks. File system reads/writes to a file server are going to be handled by the host's Operating System, and are going to occur regardless of the client's OS. Where this product adds functionality is if you were to attach an NTFS-formatted hard disk physically to your MBP. You can connect and perform file transfers to just about any shared storage across a network without the need for this product.

Dear Peter Holbrook,

Sorry for keeping silence.

Below you can find my answers:

- How does your driver behave if one tries to access a hybernated NTFS drive? Will it open it? Does it or will it have some option to non-destructively repair an NTFS drive that won't boot up?

Click to expand...

Unfortunately we have not thoroughly tested this case. I just know that you can mount any hybernated NTFS partition without any problem, after mounting it you can easily browse it, but any modifications are not recommended (write, modify, delete files/folders)!

- Will the upcoming NTFS utilities (format, etc.) be fully integrated into the OS X Disk Utility, or will tinkering with Terminal or some external application be necessary?

Click to expand...

The check utility is integrated into the Disk Utility but the format utility can be used from the command line (Terminal application) only, because Tiger 10.4.x’s Disk Utility does not support this feature. Please note, Leopard will allow you to use the check and format utilities from the Disk Utility.

- Does your driver let OS X create Trash and Desktop hidden folders and .DS_Store, etc., in NTFS drives? If it does, is there a way of keeping OS X from doing that, or is it unadvisable?

Click to expand...

Yes.
No, there is no possibility to keep OS X from doing this. Unfortunately, we are not planning to add this feature.

- Leopard is rumoured to be around the corner (26 October, they say). Will your final driver be Leopard-compatible? If released before Leopard goes gold, will an update to your driver be Leopard-compatible on the 26th or shortly afterward?

Click to expand...

We hope yes. As for now, we do not see any problems testing our driver with Leopard.

Thanks,
Anatoly.

cwa107 said:

Perry,

This product provides write capability for locally attached disks. File system reads/writes to a file server are going to be handled by the host's Operating System, and are going to occur regardless of the client's OS. Where this product adds functionality is if you were to attach an NTFS-formatted hard disk physically to your MBP. You can connect and perform file transfers to just about any shared storage across a network without the need for this product.

Click to expand...

Then I may have had a networking issue that cleared up at the same time. Coincidence? Probably. Either way, I don't care. In the mean time, I have had opportunity to connect to several external drives, both USB and Firewire. Many of these contain NTFS partitions, and I've had zero issues reading or writing to them since my last post in this topic.

So, I stand by my original opinion: This product is great, and will be well worth the money. Thank you again for developing this!

So, I installed this and it works nicely. For some reason it cleared my finder favorites but thats minor, and on the first restart my desktop was empty, but that was fixed with another restart.

Now, this lets me write to Windows, how do I write FROM Windows? Im using bootcamp, so writing both ways is always nice

I'm supposed to get Leopard the day it is released. Because of the release I assume the Beta will continue on Leopard for a while, so I will install it on Leopard as soon as I have it set up (I plan to reformat)

Ge64 said:

I'm supposed to get Leopard the day it is released. Because of the release I assume the Beta will continue on Leopard for a while, so I will install it on Leopard as soon as I have it set up (I plan to reformat)

Click to expand...

I'm planning on getting Leopard soon too.

So far, no issues with Tiger except for that uninstall issue that I had.

sorry if i'm being retarded but please help me!
I'm new to the mac.....been a pc user for 10yrs and just trying to switch.
Got an ntfs external hdd and can't access it, am hoping this will solve my problem and also allow me to install vista 64 bit and access the drive.

Anyway.....just tried installing it and its asking me for a name and serial number, what do i put in? Is the beta test up now?

Thanks in advance

Pete

Dear pierre1981,

Please re-download the beta 3. It was my fault, I uploaded a wrong version.

Thanks,
Anatoly.

Possible bug in beta 3

I'm sorry to report a possible bug in beta 3. Yesterday I tried using BlueHarvest together with the Paragon NTFS driver for Mac OS X. My intention was to prevent OS X from creating hidden .DS_Store files in every folder I opened in Finder of my NTFS internal disk. Less than half an hour after installing BlueHarvest, I was unpleasantly surprised when I double-clicked my Macintosh HD icon on the desktop. The result was:
1. The disappearance of all non-disk icons from the desktop
2. The disappearance of several of the icons that should be in the Macintosh HD Finder window
3. The unexpected appearance of iconless senseless numbers (such as _460146_, etc.) in the same Finder window as if they stood for files or folders
4. The corruption of the lower part of the sidebar. Only Applications showed. Finder preferences didn't help. No matter what I selected, only Applications would show.

I successfully deleted the com.apple.finder.plist and the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist for each user account and that restored sidebar functionality for my home directory after relaunching the Finder, but the sidebar became corrupted again after opening Macintosh HD on the desktop.

I must say my Windows disk wasn't affected by this mishap. Double-clicking on the Windows disk icon showed a corrupted sidebar, but the contents of the disk were correct.

I restarted my computer several times to no avail. I also contacted the developer of BlueHarvest, who was very much surprised by this incident.

I think another user reported something similar to what I'm reporting now, although it was a previous beta what went wrong for him. After this incident, In conclude that the Paragon driver is mostly stable, but there are some unforeseen circumstances that can cause corruption to appear.

Other than a flawless upcoming release, some guidelines as to undesirable driver combinations (such as the Paragon driver and BlueHarvest) would be most welcome.

By the way, I had to completely reinstall Mac OS X from scratch on my HFS+ disk.

Regards.
Peter

Dear Peter Holbrook,

Unfortunately we can't reproduce the problem. Could you please try to reproduce the problem. If successfully, please let us know the exact steps. Once we reproduce the problem, we will fix it ASAP.

Thanks,
Anatoly.

Dear Anatoly,

I deleted BlueHarvest, as I didn't like what it did (together with NTFS for Mac). However, I am willing to try once again once I have a working full backup of my MBP. The problem is I was planning to install Leopard tomorrow evening. I might try after that and see if I get "lucky" and get my system screwed up once again.

Can you please comment on the following?
1. Should I uninstall NTFS for Mac before I install Leopard on top of Tiger?
2. In case I don't have to uninstall NTFS for Mac before installing Leopard, I take it for granted I'll have to reinstall NTFS for Mac after installing Leopard, as I guess the kernel driver for accessing NTFS will be Apple's, not Paragon's. Is this hunch of mine correct?
3. Do you foresee any problems if I install Spotless, so that my NTFS partitions won't be indexed by Spotlight?
4. Do you think that the use of BlueHarvest is intrinsically dangerous? Are there any dangers in preventing OS X from creating .DS_Store files on NTFS volumes? Are there any dangers in preventing OS from creating .Trashes folders on NTFS volumes? If such folders aren't created and one inadvertently erases something on such volumes, can it be unerased?

Regards.
Peter

I had a problem today. I was writing to my NTFS formatted external hard drive. I had three folders. Two of the folders got overwritten with the other folder. So Folder 1, Folder 2, and Folder 3, became Folder 1, Folder 1, Folder 1. I lost the contents of Folder 2 and Folder 3. Any new folder I would create would be created as Folder 1, with Folder 1 contents. I deleted the parent folder and then re-created it. This seems to have fixed the issue.

The way it was created was; I was copying some files to Folder 3. I accidentally held the files to copy (drag & drop) too long over Folder 1, which opened Folder 1, and then copied the files to Folder 1. I then hit Cmd + Z to undo the operation, hit the Back button, which led to me seeing three instances of Folder 1.

Dear illusionist,

Thanks for this bug. We have reproduced a similar one. Once we fix it I will upload a new version.

Dear Forum Visitors,

Please do not test the current beta version (3_3) until we fix the problem that illusionist found.

Thanks,
Anatoly.