Some NTFS formatted drives not mounting (even with Paragon NTFS)

I'm not sure the disks in question are dynamic disks as these drives are all accessible by portble computers, and one of the drives came out of a portable computer. According to the article you provided, it mentioned that dynamic drives are not usable by portable computers.

However, I do believe it's how the drives were formatted, and I'm not ruling dynamic disks out yet. Once I have a new drive shipped, I will transfer all the files and reformat (NTFS of course) and see if that makes the drives accessible via OS X.

I just verified one of the drives is definitely not a dynamic disk following the directions given in the article. I launched Admin Tools/Disk Management and when I selected the volume and right-clicked, it offered the option to Convert to Dynamic Disk.

So the elusive issue of why certain NTFS formatted drives don't mount in OS X is still to be found.

I ran CHKDSK and although it found minor errors on the drives in question, it still did not solve the problem.

In addition, DISK UTILITY also shows errors on the drives, even after CHKDSK cleans any up. According to DISK UTILITY, these errors it encounters is what prevents the drives from mounting, even when I attempt to manually mount them via DISK UTILITY.

The search for the solution goes on, which has now taken even MORE importance as I was transferring files from one of the NTFS drives in question to an external Mac HFS drive (I have MacDrive installed on my Vista partition) under Vista and the power went out, cutting off the Mac HFS drive. Now the entire contents of that Mac drive are inaccessible. DISK UTILITY was unable to repair it. DiskWarrior can finds ZERO files when it rebuilds a new map.

Other Marines here experienced totally corrupted Vista OS's when they were performing either updates are even just booting up their computers when the power went out. Both cases they had to have a clean install of Vista to get their computers back running.

With those experiences and now my own, I realize it is extremely DANGEROUS to do any file transfers under Vista and there is now renewed urgency to be able to do all of my file movements from NTFS drives under Mac OS X.

To all, I'm using a MacBook Pro out here, and all my other Marines are using assorted flavors of laptops running Vista. UPS's are not readily available here in the combat zone we are located.

Now, you may say if we are all using laptops they should have gone straight to battery when the power went out without skipping a beat and having the problems we are experiencng.

Well, for the Marine getting updates to Vista, when power went out, it cut-off the internet connection which evidently corrupted the Vista update download AND somehow the existing Vista OS, so I don't think this had anything to do with write-behind enabled.

The other Marine was unpacking a brand new laptop so the battery wasn't charged. He powered it on, it began the boot process then the power went out (as you see, power outtages are a very common thing here) mid-boot. Somehow that caused his Vista OS to get completely hosed and he had to find someone with a Vista install DVD (his Tiger Direct el cheapo laptop did NOT come with any restoration CDs whatsoever). If this was indeed a write-behind issue, there was absolutely no way he could have prevented it as this was the very first time he turned on that brand new computer so he never got the chance to disable write-behind.

And finally in my instance, the Mac-formatted external drive was running on an external power source, so when the power went out it shut down that drive (my laptop and the USB-powered NTFS drive were still operational). Disabling write-behind may have preserved the HFS drive when the power cut out.

Yes, I ran CHKDSK /f (to auto fix any errors encountered). I ran it multiple times just to be safe on all the NTFS drives in question. Did not solve the problem.

So I did an experiment and completey offloaded the contents of one of the NTFS drive, a Maxtor OneTouch 4 USB drive. I then booted in OS X and used Drive Utility to reformat the drive. HFS and FAT32 both were recognized and mounted fine in OS X, but when formatted as NTFS, OS X failed to mount it and Drive Utility always reported errors, even after a fresh format!

I was completely stumped. For this particular external drive system, perhaps there is some USB controller issue that prevents NTFS formats on this drive from being properly recognized by OS X. The case doesn't seem to be easily disassembled to remove the physical drive and install in a different case/controller (and besides, it's not my drive and I don't want to inadvertently destroy it) so I couldn't take the controller out of the equation for testing purposes.

Of course for my home Mac Pro I use a UPS, but out here in the desert combat zone in tents, UPS's are not only truly a luxury, but they are way too heavy to pack in our seabags and ILBE's to be mobile enough to move out on short notice.

As I said, we all use laptops with their own batteries, but its the external devices, whether it be externally powered USB drives or the commercial internet routers, that are susceptible to the power outages that in turn can disrupt the Vista computers horribly.

So far, everything I've done under OS X when the power goes out has so far NOT resulted in a completely unrecognizable hard drive or OS. Which is why I want to do any file transfers under the auspices of OS X versus Vista.

Basically, we share music and movies to listen and watch to pass our free time whenever we can. But I'm not willing to lose important hard drive data nor my Vista OS just to copy movies.

I analyzed the Policies settings under Device Manager for all the drives I've used, both HFS and NTFS formatted, and here is what I discovered:

1) The VISTA boot partition is set for Performance but I can NOT change it to Quick Removal (it's grayed out). I'm not sure if this is because it's the booted OS and Vista will not allow the Quick Removal setting, or if this is specific to my installation (Mac hardware/partitioned drive/Vista Ultimate with SP1).

2) The HFS, externally powered drive is set to Quick Removal already, yet this did NOT prevent its directory structure from being completely garbled when it was being written to under Vista when the power went out. This tells me Write-Behind was NOT an issue, but a fundamental file writing flaw under Vista or MacDrive that is ALWAYS susceptible to directory corruption when the power goes out (I've had this drive directory hosed TWICE now under Vista when it has been unexpected disconnected either due to power outage or inadvertently disconnected from the computer prematurely).

3) All the NTFS drives were already set to Quick Removal also. I usually am copying files from an NTFS drive to an HFS drive so I haven't experienced a power outage nor premature drive disconnect when copying to an NTFS drive. I'm curious if I would experience a complete directory corruption when writing to an NTFS drive under Vista and something goes amiss as I had happened when writing to an HFS drive (I may test this scenario some day out of curiousity).