WARNING this article works for Tiger and is not Leopard compliant. You will have to use a new version of NTFS-3G for Mac and the 10.5 version of MacFUSE, but without the MacFUSE tools (the development of the tools has been dropped) (read more or just show installation instructions)
Using the NTFS file system on an OS other than Windows has always been a pain in the ass. It seemed really hard to implement it. Untill somebody on the AppleGeeks forum told me about MacFUSE and NTFS-3G for Mac (Local copy available)
Installation of the lates version is easy. Apparently, there were some problems in previous versions, but I didn’t encounter any problems on my Powerbook (yet?).
- Download MacFUSE-Core-0.2.5.dmg (latest version at time of writing this)
- Install MacFUSE and reboot your mac
- Download NTFS-3G 1.417 (Full).dmg (Local copy available).
- Install MacFUSE Tools included in the NTFS-3G full package. No reboot is needed
- Install NTFS-3G included in the NTFS-3G full package. No reboot is needed
- If you did already connect your NTFS external disk, open Disk Utility, select the NTFS volume and click Unmount (I mean unmount, and NOT Eject! However, Eject will work fine, only then you’ll have to physically disconnect the disk and reconnect it)
- Click on Mount. The NTFS volume now mounts as a read/write disk
Please Note: NTFS-3G doesn’t work (yet?) on encrypted nor compressed NTFS volumes. It is however possible to have some files compressed and others not. You can write in the uncompressed folders.
Further reading: