Damned File Systems... (external drive woes)

DaMadFiddler · Post by **DaMadFiddler** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 10:30 pm

Okay, so here's a bit of a problem.

I'm getting settled in with my shiny new MacBook Pro. I've got my external hard drive handy, with all my old data backed up on it (it was originally the drive from my old desktop, then I put it in a USB 2.0 external shell when I bought my last laptop, and used it for data backup).

Well, stupid me, I completely forgot that this thing was NTFS formatted, not FAT32. The MacBook doesn't seem to recognize it at all. I've got all my data on here, and there are several files that are too big to fit on CDs.

Is there any way I can go about getting this onto my computer without having to screw with my internal drive partitions?

Post by **|darc|** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 10:59 pm

OS X can read (but not write to) NTFS partitions, so I don't think that's the problem.

Also, I know you won't want to put it on CDs, but if you had to, you could use WinRAR to split them over multiple 700MB-sized archives...

ace · Post by **ace** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:01 pm

Not the best solution, but try it in bootcamp?

Wagh · Post by **Wagh** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:05 pm

Fairly certain there's a windows app that converts fat32 to ntfs and also does the reverse. I'd give that a try.

DaMadFiddler · Post by **DaMadFiddler** » Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:16 pm

1. I'm trying to avoid BootCamp entirely.

2. The Mac is the only computer I own, so doing anything through a Windows machine isn't an option.
?
3. Yeah, I've heard that you can access NTFS devices as read-only. This is a standard 60GB single-partition (NTFS) hard drive, in a USB 2.0 enclosure. It's a Windows XP bootable drive, since it used to be the primary drive in my old desktop and I haven't modified the OS or file structure on it at all--just created some new folders in the root to stick backup data in.

So, how do I access this drive? I'm totally at a loss. I know it works.

nz17 · Post by **nz17** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 4:07 am

Well we need a few more details here. When you plug the USB enclosure into the MacBook Pro, does it recognize it correctly as the device it is, or does it show something like "Generic USB Device" or some such? Which version of OS X are you using? Have you applied all the latest updates/patches?

After you can answer those questions, please read the following pages:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/i ... 43228.html
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 1110452194
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75320

Hopefully all that should clear things up for you. Please keep us informed.

SuperMegatron · Post by **SuperMegatron** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 3:55 pm

Go to Applications/utilities/Disk utilities and see if it shows the drive there if it does then you need to go to a windows machine or use a freedos disk and mark the usb partition as active. I had a issue like this before I think the drive has to be set to active for osx to even see it.

DaMadFiddler · Post by **DaMadFiddler** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 4:53 pm

[sigh] Well, I just took the whole thing to work with me, and transferred it over the network. I was hoping to avoid lugging all this equipment to work, since I bike (about 6.5 mile trip each way). But it's done now; I'll probably reformat the drive soon, anyway; there are some data problems.

(As I said, I lost a lot of my music work because the last backup was partially corrupt).