NTFS on Mac OS X Leopard

Not only Shahn has troubles installing NTFS-3G on Leopard, I have had serious troubles too after installing, uninstalling, reinstalling and overinstalling this driver, several tries to get it working. I had an issue with the newer version I installed after my upgrade to Leopard: every time I tried to copy a file to the NTFS disk using Finder, I got the error “filename too long” bashing over me even when I tried to copy “test.txt” to the root.

I even tried my own tutorial to install NTFS-3G using older versions of the applications/drivers but that was the point where the serious troubles began. That version is clearly not compliant with Leopard. Where previously the disk was mounted automatically in read/write mode when connected, it was now mounted with the default Mac OS X read-only driver. The only way to mount the disk read-write, was to remount it using the commandline. While I still got the “filename too long” error in Finder, I managed to copy files to the disk using cp in the Terminal.

Updated version
It is only today that I noticed both NTFS-3G and MacFUSE have had an update only recently, so I started downloading instantly. First thing to do was to uninstall the NTFS-3G driver (using the uninstall command that was provided in the disk image). Sadly, there’s no such uninstall script for MacFUSE and I haven’t found a way yet to uninstall software that doesn’t place it’s files in the Applications folder and thus can’t be removed by just trashing the files. MacFUSE has to stay where it is. After installing both updated versions, the disk is not mounted as Network Drive (which was previously done). I opened the drive while thinking the update didn’t solve my issue, but then I noticed Finder wasn’t in read-only mode! I tried to copy files and directories and indeed, it works again. Removing files however won’t trash them first, they’ll be erased immediately which is rather strange, since the .Trashes folder has been created. The option to format a disk as NTFS is also back.

Steps performed

• Unmount any connected NTFS disks and fysically disconnect them
• Uninstall NTFS-3G if possible
• Install MacFUSE 1.1.1
• Reboot the Mac
• Install NTFS-3G 1.1104 (.dmg or .pkg)
• Reboot the Mac
• Enjoy the NTFS file system.

The last step is optional. I prefer more decent file systems like HFS+ or Ext3 in combination with their appropriate operating systems of course…