Maclord's Blog

Problem with writing to (NTFS-formatted) USB drives directly connected to your Mac? No more worries. You can solve the problem by enabling read-write (and delete) access to NTFS-formatted drives and flash memories.

It’s been 4 years since I wrote my post “Ability to write to NTFS volumes on the Mac” which presented a free solution to solve the problem to writing to PC drives (or deleting files from them) with NTFS-3G and MacFuse. However, after the release of Mac OS X Lion, and then OS X Mountain Lion shortly thereafter, the suggested free solution became obsolete as the development of the MacFuse driver has been halted, and there’s no longer any official support for newer versions of Mac OS X. A new piece of open-source software called OSXFuse driver was thought to come to the rescue, however even with OSXFuse, NTFS-3G does not function properly in Lion and Mountain Lion; you will still get mounting errors every time your computer boots. So you risk to corrupt your hard drive / SSD and end up with possible data loss.

Why can’t you write to some volumes on the Mac which you also use (read & write) on the PC?

Mac OS X uses a file system called HFS+, whereas Windows uses the FAT32 and NTFS formats (which stands for NT File System) for its drives used for storage. While Mac OS X can read files on NTFS volumes, it can’t write or copy files to them – this includes the Bootcamp partition on your Mac’s hard drive (or SSD), although it can both read & write on FAT32 disks and drives. FAT32 is heading toward its end of life cycle due to its limitations such as that you cannot format a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB in size, and it cannot hold a single file larger than 4 GB. USB-memory drives with a storage capacity smaller than or equal to 4 GB are ideally formatted FAT32 with which you must be doing just fine on your Mac. However those that are larger have no choice but to have NTFS as their file system with which you’re gonna have this problem of writing on them on Mac OS X.

Fortunately, you can enable your Mac to write to NTFS writing on Mac OS X with relatively little trouble. Read more to find out about the low-cost solution which addresses the problem on Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion (aka Mac OS X 10.8).

Enter Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X

Paragon NTFS for Mac solves definitely the problem of mounting NTFS volumes as well as bringing the ability to read and write to those volumes flawlessly. A $19.95-solution from Paragon Software,  it is all you need in order to create, delete or modify any files on Windows NTFS drives (including your Bootcamp partition on your Mac if you installed Windows Vista or Windows 7 or later using the Bootcamp Utility) – and you won’t even remember there was ever a problem. Remove the barriers between NTFS and HFS with ease and confidence and no more worries about corrupting volumes and losing data.

Paragon NTFS has also been the first solution to support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
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I just bought a 15″ Retina MacBook Pro and solely for the purpose of development for IBM Websphere suite of products, especially IBM BPM and ODM (aka Websphere Operational Decision Management). IBM BPM consisting of heavy-weight components based on a process server built on top of Websphere Application Server 8, requires very powerful hardware to work with efficiently. But all these products require Windows, Linux or UNIX operation systems, so I needed to setup Bootcamp on my new Mac to install and run Windows 7 for these tasks. (This is another story I will be sharing on my IT blog soon.)

Since the new Macs no longer ship with any software installation discs, everything is downloaded from the Internet inlcluding OS X software as well as Bootcamp support (Windows driver software for Mac hardware). As a loyal Mac OS X Snow Leopard user who has been resisting to upgrade to (Mountain) Lion for a long time, with my new Retina MacBook Pro, I had no choice, but to get used to working on Mountain Lion. This includes the Bootcamp utility Mountain Lion edition (as I call it) which requires to download the Bootcamp (Windows support) drivers online (and on the fly) while setting up Bootcamp on the Mac.

In my experience, downloading the Bootcamp drivers from some Apple server took more than half a day. In order to avoid such a time loss (or any possible new Apple madness) next time  I’d set up Bootcamp, I backed up the downloaded the Bootcamp drivers, and then I decided I’d share the near-1-GB folder zipped in a single file with the rest of the world for download via my web site which is hosted on reasonably fast servers with high bandwidth (courtesy of Ozar.net).

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Apple discontinued development of their Safari web browser for Windows, and the last version of Safari they have ever released for Windows is 5.1.7. While the latest version of Safari for the Mac was 6.0.3 as of this writing with a few enhancements and the removal of the built-in RSS reader, the Windows version (which was left at 5.1.7) is not likely to be maintained by Apple any more.

There’s no direct link to download Safari for Windows from Apple’s web site either, so I decided to make it easy for those who would rather download it from here.

Safari for the Windows PCs is still a cool browser with some nifty features such as HTML 5 support, fast page rendering, advanced security and privacy options, 3D top sites view showing the most frequently visited sites, history viewing with page snapshots as cover flow, the ability to search through history as well as bookmarks, a robust web page elements inspector, a sleek RSS reader where you can adjust the feed length with a slider bar, an optional developer (tools) menu, and many more.

If you ever run into a disk image in .daa format, and you need to access its contents on Mac OS X, DAA Converter for Mac OS X is what you need.

DAA Converter for Mac OS X is a free utility for converting DAA & GBI disk images to ISO format so they can be accessed on your Mac.

DAA Converter is a native GUI application which wraps the command-line tool, DAA2ISO / GBI 2 ISO, by Luigi Auriemma.
It runs on Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or later. I have tested it on Mac OS X Leopard which works just fine on 10.5, too.

Just drag the icon of any .daa or .gib disk image onto the application’s icon, and the conversion process will instantly take place – an .iso version of the disk image will be instantly created on the same directory as the source image file.

You can download DAA Converter for Mac OS X (225) here or visit the downloads page.

Popular among Windows PC users .Uif is an alternative disk image format to others like .iso, .img and .bin-.cue couples.

You can open and convert UIF disk images on Mac OS X using one of the following disk image utilities:

1. Uif2iso which is a cross-platform command-line tool developed by Luigi Auriemma.
2. Uif2iso4mac a GUI application by Torsten Curdt . Uif2iso4mac is built upon  Luigi Auriemma’s uif2iso command line utility with a Mac graphic user interface adding basic functionalities of a real Mac app like drag-and-drop and a menu bar i.e. choosing an image using the File > Open menu.

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