Everything has a reason

… zo is het maar net…

It has happened twice. The 500GB disk I bought together with Leopard suddenly powers down from time to time and then refuses to start when I push the power button. Only way to revive the disk is to unplug it and plug it back in. The second time I searched the logs for a possible explanation and I read an error about “IndexStore in SIStoreDirytySDBCHunks:Error storing dirty sdb pages:22″ for the Spotlight folder on that disk. Spotlight. I disabled Spotlight for that disk! And now it seems that this folder caused the problem, so I removed it and I noticed there was a file .000d8322fed6 on the disk too. “data” Well, I don’t have any idea what that is, probably an erroneous leftover of an erroneous copy at the time that the diskfailure, so I removed that one too – it is only 16B anyway.

Lesson 32 in computer safety: do not remove hidden or system files if you don’t know what you are doing and especially when you don’t have any idea what they are used for.

Back in the Windows 98 aria I always laughed with people who, wanting to free some disk space, removed “autoexec.bat” and “command.com” because they didn’t use them and were in desperate need for free disk space, resulting in acute panic attacks when they rebooted their computers.

I suddenly noticed the disk hadn’t done anything for the last two hours, it hadn’t made any noise, not even a single ratle and since Time Machine normally creates a backup every hour, I thought that was suspicious. It was indeed.

Volume at path /Volumes/LaCie does not appear to be the correct backup volume for this computer. Backup failed with error: 18.

Sigh. Maybe this is the point where I’d say: I might have removed Time Machine by accident. I reconfigured Time Machine, changed the disk to be used as backup disk (but actually pointing to the same of course) and forced a backup. The “preparing” took a rather long time – longer than before – but it only backed up 365MB this time, not the 23GB that resides on my hard drive. And indeed, launching Time Machine on a folder learns none of the backups are gone and… that dot file is back.

I was lucky this time. Maybe I should stop thinking I’m smarter than the machine…

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…

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:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_3G
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macfuse
• http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html