Will Tiger Read NTFS?

OK, the title is fairly self-explanatory. I have a 120 GB external USB 2.0 drive with NTFS formatting attached to my PC. It has all my music, movies, pictures, etc. on it and I want to make sure it will talk to my new Powermac G5 with OS v10.4 (Which hasn't shipped yet.) The guy at the Apple Store said it would be better to use FAT32 formatting, but I don't have anyplace to store all my stuff in the meantime.

I could network the mac to my PC laptop and run things thattaway, but the laptop only has USB 1.1, which means a big serial chokepoint & copying everything could literally take days.

Anyone have any experience running an NTFS volume on Tiger?

I dont have tiger yet, but I know its similar in many ways to panther, I know macs can read ntfs, but not write to it, the only format pc and mac will write to is fat32, so that would be your best option, do you have a dvd burner? maybe you can back up to a dvd? or wait til you get your mac and throw it all on there, then reformat.

I have a 160gb raid0 drive (2 80gb) and a 100gb ide drive on my pc both formatted with NTFS partitions and able to copy to and from the mac without a problem. I have been moving data from my mini to the pc then to the iBook a lot the past couple of days without a problem.

Just as long as you set the permissions on your windows box to allow read / write access even with NTFS it should work without any problem.

*** This is just a quick tidbit, I have 10.3.9 not Tiger, though I don't see them taking that ability away so you should still be fine.

I gues thats a new feature of tiger, I cant wait to get it.

Macman said:

I dont have tiger yet, but I know its similar in many ways to panther, I know macs can read ntfs, but not write to it, the only format pc and mac will write to is fat32, so that would be your best option, do you have a dvd burner? maybe you can back up to a dvd? or wait til you get your mac and throw it all on there, then reformat.

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Me no have DVD burner; that's one of many incentives for the computer upgrade!
Yeah, I was just going to copy all my crap over to the new box since it'll have a 250GB internal. Then I can re-format old drive.

Thanks for the help

sevenhelmet said:

Me no have DVD burner; that's one of many incentives for the computer upgrade!
Yeah, I was just going to copy all my crap over to the new box since it'll have a 250GB internal. Then I can re-format old drive.

Thanks for the help

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There are two ways to use an external drive with both a pc and a Mac. One, and most popular is to format the external in FAT32 mode. Both systems then can read and write to the external.

Way #2 is format the external drive in the Mac format and use the program MacDrive on the pc. That allows the pc to both read and write to a Mac formated drive. The program works just fine, once installed the pc can read and write to a Mac drive just like it was a Mac.

I don't think Xp allows you to format in FAT32, but you can do it on the Mac by using the disk utility. All you need to do is move your data off the drive, format, copy it back.

EvoMac said:

I have been moving data from my mini to the pc then to the iBook a lot the past couple of days without a problem.

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But you are doing that over a network correct?

mynameis said:

But you are doing that over a network correct?

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I was about to post the same thing as you did. Unless NTFS Writing is new in Tiger which I am pretty sure it's not, There is no way with any NIX based system to write directly to a NTFS Volume at this point. If the NTFS Raid Array they are talking about is on a Windows machine and they are networking to it, sure it will read and write because it's WINDOWS doing the reading and writing. Windows Networking and Samba just allow the systems to talk and get data. The Actual writing is done by Windows itself.

I have seen the question asked about Tiger and everyone has said no, NTFS Writing is still not supported.

James said:

I don't think Xp allows you to format in FAT32, but you can do it on the Mac by using the disk utility. All you need to do is move your data off the drive, format, copy it back.

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Win2k/XP can still format and use FAT32, but with a size limit. I think thr limit is 20 or 40GB. That's one more odd thing with Windows: Win98 doesn't have that size limit for FAT32... only the new NT-based systems (the original WinNT couldn't handle FAT32 anyway).

And no, Tiger can not write on an NTFS formated harddisk connected to the Mac. When you're networking PCs and Macs, the Samba-protocol (i.e SMB) does the translation, which makes the shared partitions or disks also writeable for the Mac.

dtravis7 said:

There is no way with any NIX based system to write directly to a NTFS Volume at this point...
I have seen the question asked about Tiger and everyone has said no, NTFS Writing is still not supported.

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OK, but the Tiger machine will still READ the NTFS volume so I can get my files off??

If I network the two machines the file moving will take a month, as my wintel laptop only has USB 1.1 (STONE AGE!!!!!) USB 2.0 will take less than an hour.

FYI as a PC user (*cringes*) I have noticed that Windows XP can read a FAT32 volume, but is unstable while doing so. It's obviously not natively supported by XP. Which is STUPID, because most drives ship with a FAT32 format these days. Thank$ Bill Gate$ for making computing faster and easier for all of us...

Now you see why I go MAC.

Yes, OSX will read NTFS just fine for sure from Panther on.

Yes it will work on tiger.

I stand corrected on my previous post. I was basing my comments on

I could network the mac to my PC laptop

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As what I did with my mini and pc to get data over to it. I do all of the work with NTFS via my home network.

EvoMac said:

I stand corrected on my previous post. I was basing my comments on


As what I did with my mini and pc to get data over to it. I do all of the work with NTFS via my home network.

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Is your PC running windows? - I cant seem to get my network shares to work on tiger. So far I've found that it sends passwords encrypted but even then, it still wont mount them.

James said:

There are two ways to use an external drive with both a pc and a Mac. One, and most popular is to format the external in FAT32 mode. Both systems then can read and write to the external.

Way #2 is format the external drive in the Mac format and use the program MacDrive on the pc. That allows the pc to both read and write to a Mac formated drive. The program works just fine, once installed the pc can read and write to a Mac drive just like it was a Mac.

I don't think Xp allows you to format in FAT32, but you can do it on the Mac by using the disk utility. All you need to do is move your data off the drive, format, copy it back.

Click to expand...

STAY AWAY FROM MACDRIVE! It messed the permissions on my entire os x partition causing os x to no longer boot. Be wary, please!

I can verify to you that your Mac WILL read the files on the drive. That friend of mine that got the MacBook Pro I mentioned in my other thread, has an external drive formatted in NTFS. He can READ his files and COPY them to his MacBook, but he CANNOT write on the external drive. We spoke to an Apple technician to make sure, but it seems this is the case.

Unix systems right now can mount and read NTFS drives, but not write to them. Not without special utilities at least.

My advise: get all your files on your Mac, then format the drive to FAT32.
I hope we helped!

This thread was from May....of 2005. Indeed, UNIX systems and variants can read NTFS, but not write. There are some very experimental tools for Linux that will enable it but it is very buggy and not really usable for any purpose other than to test it and help make it better.