Access to Mac HD from Windows

I am.... flabbergasted, and floored, at the problems. None of which I've run into.

Acronis gave me a lot of grief over GPT support. I've never run into problems with Paragon (and I have copied 80GB back and forth, the only problems were the date modified was changed to "today" and of course NTFS does not like HFS+ filenames with special characters, for which you either need another program or manually look for and edit all such files.

Paragon stated support for Macs using Boot Camp?

T1mur wrote:
Eventhough Paragon is the only vendor to offer partition and backup software that is somewhat Bootcamp compatible it's far from working reliable yet.

I'd have to say this: the NTFS-3G coupled with MacFuse loaded without trouble or incident; that partition (my BootCamp partition) has now backed-up on schedule AS A REGULAR OL' MAC PARTITION along with the rest of the shootin' match - no troubles or flaws - three nights in a row.

As far as I'm concerned, it's the real deal. It works as it should, causes no problems, and backs-up just fine. I'm a happy (Boot)Camper - groaner, sorry... 🙂

This is all from pushing data from the MacOS Leopard-side to the BC partition.

And may I add for anyone reading this thread - SolidWorks2009 is smokin' in the BootCamp-XP side of life. Everything is behaving just a bit "snappier" than it was in VMware's Fusion. That's not to say Fusion isn't good, for with it, one has Leopard just a mouse-click away!

As far as reading Mac data from the XP-BC side of life, I haven't done that yet (no need or time to experiment) - however, I trust Hatter's advice on that HFS+ reading software (which was mentioned a post or two above). I will likely look into that in a few days, after the dust has settled from the sweeping changes I've made here.

Thanks guys,
mp

I never got SuperDuper to read from NTFS even with driver. However, Tri-Backup 5.1x would warn it was a foreign filesystem but happily read/write and synchronize files / folders.
http://www.tri-edre.com/english/tribackup.html

- they also have a utility to help manage TimeMachine (which didn't include NTFS volume).

This one is suppose to check and clean up HFS filenames:
http://zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/

HFS Explorer:
http://hem.bredband.net/catacombae/hfsx.html

*Thank you so much Hatter*.

I can't say this enough - your attention to others' needs is astounding and commendable.

I will look into both of your recommendations, and knowing your advice in past matters, I'll be implementing both of them in short order!

Cheers,
mp

I decided to play around with Paragon HD Manager 2009, I like it, it has already got a lot of useful tools and features, and I'm not too concerned if it lacks a recovery CD. Vista and W7 have their own.

I read a lot of praise for Acronis TI11 but when I actually tried to use it, and checked their forums.... (but I still bought their new 2009 version).

I like to be sure. Test it on my own first.

Diskeeper is/was looking to test a Mac OS X utility, if anyone is curious.
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/

I said one thing out of 1000, that caught a mod's attention, even though I gave the party line, I crossed another line. (I've always felt that Boot Camp Assistant is part of Leopard, but that any "drivers" and such should be available for download, update, just like any graphics card (not limited to "bundled with OS" stuff).

Someone here pointed out Intel had new, better LAN network driver, and this whole business keeps my learning and "engaged" rather than lose brain cells from inactivity 😉

I decided to play around with Paragon HD Manager 2009, I like it, it has already got a lot of useful tools and features, and I'm not too concerned if it lacks a recovery CD. Vista and W7 have their own.

There is no "lack" of Recovery CD, in fact it does come with a WinPE CD and you can build your own Linux based one. But the Linux based ones lack drivers for new NForce4 based Macs and the WinPE one doesn't come with the demo.

The point is, without the WinPE CD you can neither use the partitioning nor the defragmentation tools, because they both need access to the HD without Windows running (because the HD is locked for system use then). Normaly that would be handled by a boot-time engine, but that doesn't work with Bootcamp yet (at least on my Vista 64 installation).

I just got informed by Paragon that Partition Manager 10 is due to be released with improvements on Mac/Bootcamp handling. But I don't know yet if these improvements will be handed through to the Harddisk Manager suite as well. Harddisk Manager 2009 is advertised to be Boot Camp compatible, so it should be updated as well.

Furthermore "NTFS for Mac" version 7 was just released, including the "Mac Browser" now (limited read/write access to OS X partitions from Windows). Paragon told me that they know/knew about the write problems with large files/large number of files and that they released fixes for registered users that were not included into the trial. But given that the latest trial version was 6.51 I somewhat doubt that. Anyway, I will try version 7 now and report back on it's reliability.

Diskeeper is/was looking to test a Mac OS X utility, if anyone is curious.
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/

Knowing that the company behind Diskeeper is closely tied to Scientology makes me wary of letting them scan my HD and sending back informations to them. But I'm sure if they'd spy on anything personal that some computer guru would soon report so on the web and make **** of a noise about it.

I said one thing out of 1000, that caught a mod's attention, even though I gave the party line, I crossed another line. (I've always felt that Boot Camp Assistant is part of Leopard, but that any "drivers" and such should be available for download, update, just like any graphics card (not limited to "bundled with OS" stuff).

Well, most of them are. Broadcom, Atheros, Intel, Realtek and NVidia driver can all be downloaded directly from the respective vendors. Current Apple updates (Trackpad driver) can be downloaded from Apple.

For those who are without their Installation DVD in the field I put together two Boot Camp driver packages some time ago, one with ATI drivers and one without (to save download size): http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=6728508&postcount=10

Someone here pointed out Intel had new, better LAN network driver, and this whole business keeps my learning and "engaged" rather than lose brain cells from inactivity 😉

Also check Microsoft's "Update Catalog". They put out alot of new drivers with the wake of Windows 7 that also work on Vista/XP and which cannot be found on their respective vendor's sites yet. One prominent example is the Broadcom WLAN driver for current unibody Macbooks/Pros that fixes about all former problems and even allows full 300 mbit/s connection speed via the G-band with third-party routers on Windows, while OS X still is limited to 130 mbit/s.

Message was edited by: T1mur

I didn't mean that Paragon doesn't come with a utility or feature, right? only that it doesn't work.... on Macs.... with single internal drive.

I have four drives dedicated to Windows, so I don't miss the lack of a WinPE CD at all.

Seems like 2009 version just came out and another? oh well, I'll upgrade again.

Would MacDrive7 be able to allow me to share my iTunes library (33.8GBs stored on the MacOS side of life) while working in my BC Xp environment?

I really want that to happen; avoiding the obvious redundant consumption of 33+ GBs of HD space for a duplicated music library seems like a great use of a cross-platform format translator... IMHO

Thanks ~
mp

webdrum007 wrote:
Would MacDrive7 be able to allow me to share my iTunes library (33.8GBs stored on the MacOS side of life) while working in my BC Xp environment?

It sure will, and, a lot of the people using MacDrive use it for that very reason.

Hi hatter -

I wonder if I could bounce something off of you:

I do have an external Western Digital "My Book" 1TB drive - it's a back-up destination. My iTunes Library is backed-up on it. My guess is that I could point my BootCamp iTunes to it - and basically recreate my Leopard iTunes experience within my Xp enviro...

But the rub - the external Firewire WD MyBook doesn't show up at all in BootCamp! I know XP sees this drive, it appears in the device manager and the driver claims to be the latest available. Yet, when I go to My Computer, it ain't there!

=8-O Harumph!

What to do? You know I've got the MacFuse + NTFS-3G combo working just fine... By all accounts that MyBook should be seen (and usable) within BootCamp's XP-Pro enviro -

Any thoughts?

I just discovered this about XP: it can only read/see (4) four IDE drives at one time. The external MyBook is a fifth drive - hence it being labeled as "Unallocated" by XP - hence why it isn't being read or seen.

So I'm deducing that from within XP I must disassociate one of my internal HDs - such that the IDE bus in XP will "allocate" it's fourth drive readability to the WD MyBook.

Stand by for a follow-up...

Hey Fortuny... wonder if you could share your wisdom with me. I've files stored on my iDisk (on the Mac partition so-to-speak) that I would love to access from WinXP, which I run in the same computer via BootCamp. So, is there a way I can access and edit the files stored locally on my MB the same way I can access my music on the Mac partition? BTW, I use MacDrive 7 to get access to my Mac Partition from BootCamp. Thanks in advance.

http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/

http://www.apple.com/mobileme/news/2009/02/sharing-large-files-with-idisk.html

Thanks for your post, but I was looking for a way to access the content I have on my iDisk within the hard drive itself. The thing is that, via MobileMe, I would have to download the file to the Windows (bootcamp) partition, work on in, upload it to the iDisk so then it would sync to my Mac partition. Is this correct? I've installed MacDrive on my windows partition, and am able to access all of my "Mac hd", but can't seem to find the path to the iDisk (that is, the files locally stored on iDisk).

Thanx.