[chucker]

I've been waiting literally years for this to happen. Now it did.

MacFUSE is a port of FUSE to Mac OS X. FUSE is a way to implement a filesystem in userspace, rather than in the kernel.

What does that mean?

It means, for one, that ports of Linux filesystem implementations are now far more realistic. SSHFS, for instance, has already been done. Moreover, this makes an NTFS-3G port much more tangible, since that, too, uses FUSE.

And NTFS-3G, of course, would mean NTFS read/write support! I'm sure there's lots of Boot Camp users that would greatly appreciate this.

[blakbyrd]

Nice.

[Robo]

That's all way over my head, but, um, party on!

[turtle]

Laymen's terms: Mac OS will have full read/write to XP/Vista file system?

[chucker]

Originally Posted by turtle2472 Laymen's terms: Mac OS will have full read/write to XP/Vista file system?

No. However, a huge step in the direction has been made. Namely, the framework (FUSE) used by Linux's "full read/write to XP/Vista file system" (NTFS-3G) has just been ported to Mac OS X. NTFS-3G itself has not, but this facilitates things a lot.

It cannot yet be definitely said that it will happen. But it's just become a heck of a lot more likely.

[turtle]

Oh, cool. Thanks for the education.

[chucker]

According to http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wik...SYSTEMS_TESTED , NTFS-3G has been "compiled and tested to work". I can't get it to build yet, however.

[Schnauzer]

Originally Posted by Roboman That's all way over my head, but, um, party on!

umm yeah

[chucker]

Oh, and Chuckaha will be delighted to find that this makes FTP server uploads in the Finder possible, thanks to Fuseftp.

[chucker]

Things are much closer than I thought. I managed to mount an NTFS partition as read/write. Create a folder, read a file, move stuff around, unmount, remount, changes preserved.

Almost perfect. Some minor stuff to work out.

FAT32 is fast becoming obsolete.

[chucker]

Alright. It's still a little cumbersome and user-unfriendly, but the remaining stuff can be worked out easily.

If anyone wants to give it a shot, here's some documentation. You will need Xcode Tools for this, and will want to follow the steps exactly.

The first thing you have to do is download and install MacFUSE.

1) Download the current tarball from here.
2) Open Terminal. Navigate to where you downloaded the file. For instance, if you downloaded it to the desktop, type:

cd Desktop

3) Extract the tarball onto your system, effectively installing it:

sudo tar -C / -jxvpf fuse-binaries-0.1.0b006.tar.bz2

This will prompt for your password. Enter it, then wait as things get extracted and copied.

Second, you need NTFS-3G.

1) Download the current tarball from here. Unlike the above, this one's a source tarball: we need to compile it. Again, you need to have Xcode Tools installed!
2) Extract the tarball locally just by double-clicking it in the Finder. You should get a "ntfs-3g-0.20070102-BETA" folder. Go inside.
3) Open the "configure" file (not any of the similarly-named ones, such as "configure.ac"!) in a text editor. TextEdit will do.
4) Find the line consisting of:

case "$target_os" in

Right afterwards, there should be a line containing:

linux*)

Replace this to read:

*)

This removes a hardcoded check whether your OS is Linux. The makers of NTFS-3G don't want to support non-Linux OSes because they don't have the hardware to maintain reliability.
5) Save the file and close it.
6) Open a Terminal window. Navigate to the folder you just extracted. You can simply type "cd " (with a space) into the window, then drag the folder from the Finder into the Terminal window; its path should appear after the "cd ". Then hit return.
7) Run:

CFLAGS="-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D__FreeBSD__=10" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local

This will take a while. It will verify that your OS is suitable, and adjust some of the code to Mac OS X's specifics.
8) Now, run:

make

This does the actual compiling and linking: the building.
9) Finally, run:

sudo make install

If it's been more than a few minutes, you'll get another password prompt now. Afterwards, it should copy itself into the appropriate locations.

If you got this far, there isn't much left. I'm gonna assume you have an NTFS partition mounted (as read-only) right now, e.g. your Boot Camp partition (assuming you didn't format that one as FAT32). I'm also assuming in the following that your NTFS partition is named "Windows".

1) Open Disk Utility.
2) Select your NTFS partition. In the toolbar, or in the File menu, select Unmount. It should become greyed out in the list, and disappear in the Finder.
3) Still in Disk Utility, Get Info on the partition. You should see a line like:

Disk Identifier : 	disk0s3

This identifier is important, you'll need it in a minute.
4) You need to manually create a mountpoint now (this is one fiddly thing left to fix, but a minor one):

sudo mkdir /Volumes/"Windows"

(Replace "Windows" accordingly. Make sure that, if your NTFS partition has spaces in its name, those too are wrapped in double quotes, like this:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/"Windows Partition"

)
4) Finally, mount it:

ntfs-3g /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/"Windows" -o ping_diskarb,volname="Windows"

The "disk0s3" above needs to be replaced with whatever your disk identifier actually is.

It should appear in Finder now. If it doesn't, these two commands might help:

disktool -r

and:

killall Finder

The first refreshes disk arbitration (keeps mounted partitions in sync between Unix-y stuff and Mac OS-y stuff), and the second relaunches Finder.

Now, to unmount the disk later on, if you're so inclined (you don't normally have to do this):

sudo umount /dev/disk0s4@0

This will also, however, remove the mountpoint. This means that, for now, every time you want to mount your partition as read-write, you have to follow the above steps of unmounting the read-only version, creating a mount point, and mounting a read/write version.

Good luck!

P.S.: While this worked perfectly for me, I don't claim responsibility for any damages. Backups are always, always a good idea.

[chucker]

Done.

[ShadowOfGed]

Alright, I'm going to make it a lot easier to wreck your NTFS partitions.



I've taken the liberty of making installer packages for MacFUSE and NTFS-3g. The MacFUSE package also automatically takes care of loading and unloading the FUSE kext as necessary.

Both MacFUSE and NTFS-3g are built as Universal Binaries, so they should work for both PowerPC and Intel. NOTE: I've not yet tested it on either one, since I have no NTFS partitions right now. I followed chucker's instructions to build them, so it should be OK.

The NTFS-3g installer requires that you have the MacFUSE package installed first, so install them in this order:

1. MacFUSE 0.1.0b4. This installs MacFUSE and its dependencies.
2. NTFS-3g Beta 2007-01-02. This installs the Universal ntfs-3g tools.

As mentioned before, backups are always, always a good idea. But for those of you who don't have Xcode or aren't comfortable building things from the command line, here are the installation packages you'll need.

The instructions for mounting NTFS volumes still stand, as given by chucker's post above.

Enjoy!

[ShadowOfGed]

Now that we've got MacFUSE and NTFS-3g compiled, it appears that with some work and trickery, it's possible to make OS X mount all NTFS drives, by default, using NTFS-3g.

I'm poking around to find what I can about file system bundles. This would go in /Library/Filesystems/ntfs-fuse.fs. It'd be in addition to fusefs.fs, which is just for the MacFUSE part. Adding ntfs-fuse.fs would give DiskArbitration the information it needs to know how to mount via NTFS-3g.

I'll post more later when I've got it figured out.



UPDATE: After wrestling with DiskArbitration, I can't figure out how to make it work. I can make it detect the volume as "ntfs-fuse," but for some reason the actual mount command never gets run, so it horks NTFS access. Maybe I'll figure it out later.

[chucker]

You should update your packages for 0.1.6.

[Mugge]

Originally Posted by chucker No. However, a huge step in the direction has been made. Namely, the framework (FUSE) used by Linux's "full read/write to XP/Vista file system" (NTFS-3G) has just been ported to Mac OS X. NTFS-3G itself has not, but this facilitates things a lot. It cannot yet be definitely said that it will happen. But it's just become a heck of a lot more likely.

So soon I will be able to write to peoples NTFS formatted USB sticks, if I install some of this FUSE stuff? That would be a huge win!

[Wyatt]

Originally Posted by Mugge So soon I will be able to write to peoples NTFS formatted USB sticks, if I install some of this FUSE stuff? That would be a huge win!

People actually format flash drives as NTFS? Why?

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Mugge So soon I will be able to write to peoples NTFS formatted USB sticks, if I install some of this FUSE stuff? That would be a huge win!

Yes.

Originally Posted by fcgriz People actually format flash drives as NTFS? Why?

Indeed, it's a bad idea. NTFS is a very complex file system and keeps the drive quite busy. It also has a lot of overhead. This significantly decreases the flash drive's lifetime and available space. (Virtually the same applies for HFS+.)

FAT32 is truly the best option here. (Well, strictly speaking, jffs2 is a much better option, but then you'd have to install that on Windows as well…)

NTFS is best for:
1) a Boot Camp Windows partition
2) general storage between most systems, with fewer limitations (e.g., files bigger than 4 GBs) and better performance than FAT32. Readable virtually everywhere, writable on newer Linux distros and now, with a third-party install, on Mac OS X.

[bassplayinMacFiend]

Gotta say, this is pretty cool stuff you turned up here, Chucker.

Also, an honorable mention must go to ShadowOfGed for simplifying the install process.

[Wyatt]

Originally Posted by chucker Yes.

Weird. I would have never thought people would do that. Most flash drives come formatted as FAT32 out of the box, so people are actually going out of their way to format them as NTFS. Very strange. I've always kept mine FAT32, if for no other reason than that it works on pretty much every platform. That way I know, no matter what OS I'm sitting down to, my files will be accessable.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by fcgriz Weird. I would have never thought people would do that. Most flash drives come formatted as FAT32 out of the box, so people are actually going out of their way to format them as NTFS. Very strange. I've always kept mine FAT32, if for no other reason than that it works on pretty much every platform. That way I know, no matter what OS I'm sitting down to, my files will be accessable.

Like I said above, reformatting to NTFS isn't a good idea on a flash drive anyway, even if you only use it with Windows.

[turtle]

Originally Posted by chucker Like I said above, reformatting to NTFS isn't a good idea on a flash drive anyway, even if you only use it with Windows.

I confess, I used to.

[ShadowOfGed]

Originally Posted by chucker You should update your packages for 0.1.6.

Done! Updated installer for MacFUSE is here: MacFUSE 0.1.0b6.dmg.

Sorry for potentially noobish question , but I'm getting

-bash: ntfs-3g: command not found

after trying to mount

ntfs-3g /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/"Windows" -o ping_diskarb,volname="Windows"

Using
MacFUSE 0.1.0b6.dmg
NTFS-3g Beta 2007-01-02

any ideas?

[chucker]

Ah, yes.

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /usr/bin/ntfs-3g

Then open a new Terminal window and it should work there.

[ShadowOfGed]

Originally Posted by Nik Sorry for potentially noobish question , but I'm getting -bash: ntfs-3g: command not found after trying to mount ntfs-3g /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/"Windows" -o ping_diskarb,volname="Windows" any ideas?

These install binaries into /usr/local/bin, which is not in your $PATH by default. There are two possible solutions (one of which chucker mentioned):

1. Create a symbolic link in /usr/bin, like so:
   
   

   sudo ln -s ../local/bin/ntfs-3g /usr/bin/ntfs-3g

2. Add /usr/local/bin to your $PATH, by editing ~/.profile and adding this to the *end*:
   
   

   PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/binexport PATH

Hope that helps!

P.S. Chucker, I've found that relative symlinks are generally better ideas than absolute. Don't know exactly where I picked that up, but it's a habit now.

[chucker]

You can actually compact those two PATH lines into one, like

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

It's also a better idea to prepend your addition so it has priority; your custom stuff is more likely to be up-to-date than Apple-supplied tools. I.e.:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Wrt/ relative symlinks, I think it's fairly irrelevant in this case. FWIW, I've never personally needed to use relative ones, though I can sure see their merits.

[ShadowOfGed]

Originally Posted by chucker You can actually compact those two PATH lines into one, like export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

Yeah, but I believe that's a bash-specific syntax, where doing it on two lines is slightly more portable. Since OS X uses bash as the default shell, that's a moot point for most of us.

Originally Posted by chucker It's also a better idea to prepend your addition so it has priority; your custom stuff is more likely to be up-to-date than Apple-supplied tools. I.e.: export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Yeah, that's true... I was just thinking along the lines of "only check here if the command isn't provided," since stuff like ntfs-3g isn't shipped by Apple. I actually got burned by my PATH ordering while building NTFS-3g, since I also had pkg-config installed under DarwinPorts, and /opt/local/bin appeared before /usr/local/bin. I fixed that, though.

And I've successfully derailed the thread.

In other news, if anyone can find a good resource on how to construct properly-working file system bundles (like those in /System/Library/Filesystems), that's probably the correct route to making ntfs-3g the default NTFS implementation. Unfortunately, when I gave it a shot, I ran into problems getting diskarbitrationd to call the ntfs-3g "mount" implementation. The debug log from diskarbitrationd wasn't very helpful.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by ShadowOfGed In other news, if anyone can find a good resource on how to construct properly-working file system bundles (like those in /System/Library/Filesystems), that's probably the correct route to making ntfs-3g the default NTFS implementation. Unfortunately, when I gave it a shot, I ran into problems getting diskarbitrationd to call the ntfs-3g "mount" implementation. The debug log from diskarbitrationd wasn't very helpful.

I take it you did review http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1242.html?

Can you send me what your .fs bundle looks like thus far?

[ShadowOfGed]

Originally Posted by chucker I take it you did review http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1242.html ?

No, I hadn't found that in my searching. I'll take a look at it later, but I've actually got to head out for now.

Thanks for the link!