I bought a new 1T USB drive to use for storage of vm images and other large files. I need to move between Windows and Mac machines. I knew I couldn’t get a Mac version of a usb drive because those are typically formatted for HPFS which a Windows machine cannot read. I opted for the Windows version of the drive and when I got it home I plugged it into the trusty Macbook Pro. The drive mounted read-only, because it was formatted with NTFS.
At first I figured why not reformat with FAT32, then I could use the drive with Linux as well as Mac and Windows. The problem with FAT32 is there’s a file size limitation. I remembered this after I reformatted and tried to copy a 4.3G vmware image to the drive. Ooops.
Some quick googling resulted in this article: http://www.tool-box.info/blog/archives/1193-Snow-Leopards-NTFS-readwrite-support.html
Using the schell script method I now mount any NTFS partition in read/write mode on my Mac.
