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>> So I've got a MacBook Pro and I'm using Boot Camp to run Windows part of the time. Great. But I can't write to the Windows partition when I'm in OS X 'cause it's in a different file format. How can I modify documents and stuff when I'm using OS X? I'm Tom Merritt from CNET.com. We'll solve this little quandary on today's Insider Secret.
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>> The problem lies in the file system. Without getting into it too much, your Mac uses something called HFS, and most new windows machines use NTFS. OS X can read NTFS, but can't write to it. Thankfully, Amit Singh, and employee of Google, came up with something called MacFuse, which makes it possible to use any file system in your Mac user space. See how that works? It's a fairly simple process to implement, if you like command line. Go to code.google.com/p/macfuse and download the latest version and install it. This will make your Mac able to add new fuses, or file system supports. In our case, we want to implement the NTFS fuse. So go to NTFS-3g.org and download the Mac OS X version and install it. Now we have to mount the disks. Here's what worked for me. Go to finder, open applications, and utilities, and open the disk utility. Find your NTFS volume. That's the Window's volume. Select it, then go up there and press unmount. Note the real name of the disk here. Disk OS 3. You can command click, or right click and select information to find that name as well. Now go to finder. Applications. Utilities. And start terminal. Type the following to create a SIM link,
pseudoln -s /system/library/filesystems/fusefs.fs/mount
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_fusefs /usr/bin/mount_fusefs. See, told you had to like command line. Then create a new directory to mount the Widows drive into, mkdir /volume/windows. And finally, mount the volume with this line, pseudontfs-3g /dev/discos3 mnt/windows-0ping_discard,volnume=windows. You don't have to know what it means. Just know that it works. What have you done? You've created a link to the fuse file system for interpreting NTFS, and mounted the windows drive into a directory under OS X so you can -- da da da -- read and write your Windows files from OS X. Now, I didn't have to do anything else. The Windows file system mounts for me every time I start up OS X. But two notes here. Number one, write performance of NTFS-3G is reputedly somewhat poor. It has to with an OS X VM buffer cache, or rather the lack of one. But I wrote the script for this video using Mac Views to access and save the script, and had no major issues. Number two, I don't know of a free way to write to HFS from Windows, but if you want to pay 50 bucks, apparently MacDrive 7 works very well. That's it for this edition of Insider Secrets. I'm Tom Merritt, CNET.com
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