Small thing, big problem.
Sighz. Another long night battling with IT stuff today.
Dad wanted to xfer his SP Engg show photos to his SD card, but to his charging his macbook pro won't recognise the SD card no matter what. My comp could recognise the card though… but only in read only mode. In the end we could get his comp to read the SD card when the physical setting is set to 'lock' mode… but even when we tried on my comp, my mum's pappy, we still could not get the SD card to read AND write. It just opens in read only mode no matter what. So yeah… something wrong with the card.
Then we tried to open his external hard disk on the mac… and it turns out that the driver to read the NTFS file is… not working…
I installed OSXFUSE on his computer already… but…???
Turns out that i still had to install that old, discontinued NTFS-3G thing for it to work. OSXFUSE is only a MacFuse replacement product… and for the whole she-bang to work, BOTH the drivers had to be installed. So i DLed and installed NTFS-3G. But nope it didn’t work. Nothing came up… turns out that I had to enable NTFS-3G in the pref pane… but still… only got an error msg and it can't mount the drive. Turns out that… I have to reinstall OSXFUSE and install the additional MacFuse compatibility layer as well… and so after all that hassle… yeah finally got the entire package to work.
Good thing though, is that i found a patch to prevent that 'timeout' or whatever error thing that always pops up when i plug a NTFS drive into my comp. Meh… i installed everything nicely on my dad's comp last time, but after his hard disk was changed i thought the NTFS-3G thing was not needed to read the NTFS drives and just installed OSXFUSE was sufficient so… yeah… ><
To summarise…
How to read NTFS drives on mac (Lion/Mountain Lion etc) for FREE:
1. Install NTFS-3G. Download NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2010.10.2. Yes, the support for this software has been dropped.
2. Install Fuse_wait (work around patch, it works alright w/o this too, just that you get a popup every time you plug in the drive)
3. Install OSXFuse and make sure you select the MacFuse compatibility layer checkbox when installing. DL the latest stable release, at the time of writing it is version 2.5.4.
Select all three checkboxes. The package name is greyed out in the abv picture because all three have already been installed on my computer.
Credits to this post on macbreaker for alerting me to the patch. As mentioned in the post (and as any google search will yield), Paragon NTFS also lets you write on NTFS drives but it costs 20 USD. Tuxera NTFS is from the same guys who made NTFS-3G, and it costs 25 Euros. Tuxera is kinda like the pro version of NTFS-3G if you wish… they used to develop both the pro and the free version, but eventually support for the free version was dropped (actually about two years ago).
So yup… that's all for this post…! Now i'll have a reference if i ever need to install all these all over again… e.g. if i ever get a new mac… IF… :X *dreams on*
No comments:
Post a Comment