Sharing NTFS with OSX

Recently I gave OSX a shot on my desktop hardware. If you aren’t sure how that is possible, check out osx86project.org. Anyways, this posed a few problems if I wanted to use OSX for any amount of time. My Adobe Lightroom files were all stored on an NTFS formatted hard drive. Out of the box, OSX has no way of recognizing this file system. OSX uses HFS+ and can also read/write FAT and FAT32 drives. It cannot write to NTFS drives without additional drivers. This is where a program named MacFUSE can come in handy. MacFUSE allows you to extend the filesystems that OSX can handle.

The other piece of the puzzle is NTFS-3G. This is a type of connection between MacFUSE and your NTFS stored files.  NTFS-3G is a driver that is freely available and can read/write NTFS to multiple operating systems.  It is fast, safe, and has been tested against Windows XP, 2003, 2000 and Vista.

Using these two mac extensions, I am now able to read/write/delete to my NTFS windows formatted partitons. This includes all of my music, images, and Adobe Lightroom files that I have stored there. Now I can boot up into either Vista or OSX, and still share files between the two. If you are looking for the exact opposite of what I have described here, and you want to access OSX files on Windows, you might want to give MacDrive a try.

-DPollitt