[ILUG] OT: mac hacking with an NTFS drive

[Brendan Kehoe]

Since I'm sure lots of people fiddle with OS X too...

I've got a large NTFS-formatted drive we're using to hold our music.
I've been able to mount it and use it read-only on the Mac Mini we've
got running Tiger.  No worries.

Today I plugged it back into my Windows-laden laptop to add a bunch of
music we found in our backups.  When it was done, I unmounted it from
the laptop, power-cycled it, and plugged it into the Mini. It shows up
fine---but only two of the four folders appear.  One of the missing
folders had shown up before, but perhaps because it had lots of stuff
added, it's hiding.

Back into the laptop, Windows sees them just fine.  Something about how
NTFS handles directories isn't playing nice with the OS X implementation
of reading it.  The same drive plugged into my desktop system running
SuSE 10.1 is also able to happily mount and read it, listing all of the
directories properly.

I did an error-check pass and then even a defragment on the volume,
but try as I might they won't show up.  I even tried just creating a new
folder on it 'trynew', off the laptop, onto the mini, no dice--only two
appear.  A Google for this hits a few posts about people suffering the
same thing, but no useful replies and even worse, no actual answers.

Any of you seen such a thing, or have theories?  I could, through some
effort, look at doing FAT32/FAT16 instead, but that's a pain.  I've
gotten a copy of MacDrive 6 for the Windows system so another approach
is, after saving everything, reformat it HFS+ and go ahead and put
everything back on it and just avoid NTFS completely.  (MacDrive is
frigging awesome, it makes any Mac volume---or CD/DVD---perfectly usable
in every way, including able to be created on the Windows host and then
used on the Mac.  Wonderful software when you're stuck in Windows for
whatever company-related reasons.)

Of course, finding a fix now would be considerably less effort than
HFS-ifying the whole frigging disk.  :-)   (And touching my other
free disk that's sitting in the box on the shelf staring at me, knowing
I shouldn't
touch it yet.)

Thanks for any hints,
B