Can I write to an NTFS formatted drive on a PC Network?

I had a quick question that I am sure someone in this qualified group will be able to answer.
My existing laptop PC for work is about shot, and my company has said that I could replace it with anything (Excellent!). So I'm looking at the 17'' Mac Book Pro (especially now with Boot Camp). I've been a pretty big Mac supporter and have owned one for my personal stuff for 10+ years, so I’m not too worried about the quality of the product,
With a Mac for home and then a PC for work, I’ve never had any problems transferring files, it was always a simple as an email or transfer via a USB flash drive. But at work, we have a PC file server that is running XP (possibly 2000 and I don’t know it if is the “server” version of this software or not), and on my laptop it is mounted as an available network drive. When I’ve done properties view on the drive, I’ve confirmed its an NTFS formatted drive.
So the question is, will the Mac be able to connect, mount, read and WRITE to this drive since it will be mounted as a network drive and NOT as a directly connected drive (which sounds like the cause for the read-only ability in the Bootcamp discussions)? Also, would this be using the SMB feature to connect then, any issues anyone knows about?
Unfortunately for me, the current laptop PC I have is formatted in FAT32 so I can't just solve this with existing hardware and I don't just carry my Dual 2.7 G5 to the office all that often. I know its pretty simple and someone must have done it before.
Here’s an Apple article that is silent on the drive format - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=19652
Thanks
Dual G5 - 2.7Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Hi Numbers,
In this situation the format of the volume on the server is less important than the way you connect to it. Windows sharing presents on the network via SMB, which Mac OS X speaks fluently; it doesn't matter too much whether the server's locally connected volume is formatted NTFS or FAT32, as long as it is shared out to the clients.
If you were to try to connect an NTFS-formatted volume DIRECTLY to your Mac, however, you would find that no matter what you did it would show up read-only -- since NTFS permissions are tightly connected to Windows and to Active Directory, it's not possible for Mac OS X to respect them for writing, and so Apple avoids writing to NTFS altogether.
Short answer, you should be fine on your office network. If you want to be sure, borrow a friend's Mac and check it at work.
Good luck!

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How can I write to a ntfs formatted drive?

I know there are some third party apps for a fee but this seems like a simple enough and popular request that Apple should address. Can you tell me if apple has a solution for this?
I appreciate your help.
Thanks,
John

No Apple solution (well, the solution would be for you to only buy Mac stuff and reformat your hard drive to Mac ).
NTFS drivers for Macs (there may be others):
Paragon NTFS - http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ - recommendation: https://discussions.apple.com/message/18708633
Tuxera NTFS 2012.3.2 - http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33122/tuxera-ntfs
NTFS for Mac OS X 9.5.3 - http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26288/ntfs-for-mac-os-x
There used to be NTFS-3G which I believe was free, but it looks like it is now Tuxera. Maybe an old version would work (or maybe not).
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ and http://i.vishalagarwal.com/post/30387627819/ntfs-write-on-lion-or-mountain-lion

Can't write on my usb pen drive from 2 days?!?

hi, from 2 days i can't write on my usb pen drive (Transcend JetFlash Flash 16gb with FAT32 partition)
if I do a manual mount in a console by root, I can easly a do cp command and copy files over.
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Last edited by ozeta (2009-05-21 19:10:19)

Have you tried running dosfsck on the device? Of course, be sure that you unmount the usb drive and verify the dev file of the relevant partition.
Something like:
dosfsck /dev/sdb1 <----replace with correct dev file!!
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dosfsck -a /dev/sdb1
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Last edited by madalu (2009-05-22 12:45:26)

Can I copy files from an external NTFS formatted drive to my Mac?

My PC laptop died and I have two external NTFS formatted hard drives. I also have a desktop Mac.
I searched and came across another post dated Sept 2005 in the Support Forum that asked this similar quesiton I post. Sorry if i appear to sound repetitive but I really need confirmation to the answer for reason stated below.
The answer given then was as follows, "Max OSX can only read files on an NTFS formatted external hard drive -- it cannot write files to such a drive [OK, that is clear to me]. If you copy a file from an NTFS formatted hard drive to the internal hard drive of your Mac, there are absolutely no restrictions on what you can do to that copy of the file."
So, to me this means I can modify the JPEG file in my Mac using Photoshop, right? No reformatting of the NTFS drive is necessary? If so, please let me know ASAP as i have a deadline to return the brand new PC which I purchassed thinking that that was my solution.
I pose this question to this forum because the original post is 8 years old and wonder if OS compatibility issues remain the same.

If you want to modify the JPEGs you have on the NTFS external disk, you will have to copy the images to your Mac hard disk before editing them.
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Sparse Bundle Images on external NTFS formatted drive

I'm currently in the process of re-arranging my own backup setup following on from my recent update to Snow Leopard. For this purpose i have the lend of a NTFS formatted external drive and used a large Sparse bundle disk image.
Under 10.5.7 with the latest MacFuse and and unknown version of NTFS-3G i had no problem using the sparse bundle images, they mounted, I could read and write, and the images where only unmounted when I explicitly ejected them.
Under 10.6 with the latest MacFuse and the latest NTFS-3G i have a very strange behavior.
Read and write works fine on the NTFS drive, as do regular disk images and old style sparse disk images.
However sparse bundle disk images will mount and then immediately dismount again. I have no problems mounting the sparse bundle images from HFS+ drives or when using the NTFS drive read only using apples drivers instead of MacFuser+NTFS3G.
The disk image dose not see the be the source of the problem; as any sparse bundle that opens fine on a HFS+ drive exhibits the behavior when moved onto the NTFS drive. Moving the image back onto a HFS+ drive allows the image to be mounted.
The problem is that I require to move some additional files onto the NTFS drive so I can reformat my backup drive
As a side note mounting using "hdiutil attach -readonly" seems to partially resolve the issue; the image will mount and stays mounted but it is read only.

I too am having this issue. Intel / 10.5.8 attached to an SMB share from Ubuntu Linux.
I ran a test of various image types, and while Sparse Image works, Sparse Bundle fails. Here are my logs. Happy to do some testing and log posting if anyone has a test theory to try.
9/5/09 2:20:29 PM Disk Utility[1822] Disk Utility started.
9/5/09 2:22:38 PM Disk Utility[1822] Creating Image “test1-rw-disk-image.dmg”
9/5/09 2:22:38 PM Disk Utility[1822] Initializing…
9/5/09 2:22:38 PM Disk Utility[1822] Creating…
9/5/09 2:22:39 PM Disk Utility[1822] Formatting…
9/5/09 2:22:39 PM com.apple.KernelEventAgent[37] KernelEventAgent: sysctl_queryfs: No such file or directory
9/5/09 2:22:39 PM Disk Utility[1822] Attaching…
9/5/09 2:22:40 PM Disk Utility[1822] Finishing…
9/5/09 2:22:41 PM Disk Utility[1822] Image “test1-rw-disk-image.dmg” created successfully.
9/5/09 2:23:21 PM Disk Utility[1822] Creating Image “test2-sparse-disk-image.sparseimage”
9/5/09 2:23:21 PM Disk Utility[1822] Initializing…
9/5/09 2:23:21 PM Disk Utility[1822] Creating…
9/5/09 2:23:21 PM Disk Utility[1822] Formatting…
9/5/09 2:23:21 PM com.apple.KernelEventAgent[37] KernelEventAgent: sysctl_queryfs: No such file or directory
9/5/09 2:23:21 PM Disk Utility[1822] Attaching…
9/5/09 2:23:23 PM Disk Utility[1822] Finishing…
9/5/09 2:23:24 PM Disk Utility[1822] Image “test2-sparse-disk-image.sparseimage” created successfully.
9/5/09 2:24:04 PM Disk Utility[1822] Creating Image “test3-sparse-bundle-image.sparsebundle”
9/5/09 2:24:04 PM Disk Utility[1822] Initializing…
9/5/09 2:24:04 PM Disk Utility[1822] Creating…
9/5/09 2:24:04 PM Disk Utility[1822] Formatting…
9/5/09 2:24:05 PM Disk Utility[1822] Finishing…
9/5/09 2:24:05 PM Disk Utility[1822] Unable to create “test3-sparse-bundle-image.sparsebundle”. (Operation not supported)
9/5/09 2:24:05 PM Disk Utility[1822]

Suddenly can't write to an external hard drive that I have been using consistently

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Install software such as Paragon NTFS on the computer.
(63161)

Is there any way to write-enable an NTFS-format WD external Hard Drive ?

I have a WD Elements external HD unit, 1TB previously formatted NTFS under Windows XP on a PC. I would like to use this HD unit to both read and write data using both the Windows PC and a MacBook Pro. But when connected to the MacBook Pro (USB), the HD unit shows up as Read Only.
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Edit:
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Message was edited by: Barney-15E

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Doc

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[General information on I/O error -36|http://fuzzy.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/ioerror-36>
[Error -36 reported when copying files to external drive|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8467699]
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Can't write to external hard drive set up by Windows

We have a 300gb Maxtor external hard drive. I had set it up using the Windows laptop I use for work.
The Mini that we have can read, but not write to, this external drive. I just went back and set the Security properties to allow Full Control for the Everyone group. That did not work; the drive is still read-only for the Mini.
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Why is the drive spinning for no apparent reason? Is there something we can look at to find out what's happening with it?
Any other suggestions for fixing the problem? I'd like to avoid reformatting it, if possible....

We have a 300gb Maxtor external hard drive. I had set
it up using the Windows laptop I use for work.
The Mini that we have can read, but not write to,
this external drive. I just went back and set the
Security properties to allow Full Control for the
Everyone group. That did not work; the drive is still
read-only for the Mini.
Sounds like the drive is formatted in NTFS. Under OSX, your Mac will be able to read, but not write, to an NTFS formatted drive.
If you format as HFS or HFS+, the Mac will be able to readd/write to the disk, but the Windows box will not be able to recognize the disk.
Since it is a 300gb drive, FAT will not work (FAT does not recognize drives that large).
It must be formatted as FAT32.
It can be formatted as such on either the windows box or the Mac.
You can partition the disk, one HFS+, one FAT32, but the windows box still will not be able to recognize the HFS partition, and the Mac will be able to read/write both.
So...for maximum compatibility and cross-platform usage, format the drive as FAT32.
As for as the periodic drive spin, it's possible Spotlight is updating it's index.

Can I write to an NTFS formatted drive on a PC Network?

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