bootcamp windows 7 Firewire external drive NTFS?

Question

bootcamp windows 7 Firewire external drive NTFS?

Hi,
Anyone had any success creating an external firewire drive with bootcamp windows 7, ntfs format? If so, how did you do it?

I tried this but have failed. The end result is that windows sees the drive but fails to write at firewire speeds on to the the drive. What I did:
bought paragon ntfs
formatted my external FW drive as NTFS (from Mac).
restart in windows
windows "sees" drive
test copies to new drive failed... super slow (48 hrs to copy 100GB).
updated boot camp to 3.1
now when I copy to FW, speeds are normal but process freezes at about 95% compete on ALL file transfers to FW.

What should I do? I desperately need to have a FW backup option for my windows 7.

Thanks,
Mike

Mac pro (early 2008 desktop), 8 x 2.8, 12GB Ram, 4TB, Mac OS X (10.6.2), Boot camp 3.1, win 7 pro 64bit, 8800 gt

Posted on Apr 10, 2010 11:10 PM

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Answer 1

Apr 11, 2010 9:54 AM in response to Michael Northcutt

I am Having the same problem and did not find any solution did you find one ?

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Answer 2

Apr 11, 2010 10:01 PM in response to Zico Bronzi

No.

I haven't done any more trouble shooting since posting this. Actually this post IS my current attempt to solve the issue. I don't even have good theories at this point. Does anyone have any suggestions, solutions or success stories?

Thanks!
Mike

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Answer 3

Apr 13, 2010 3:28 PM in response to Michael Northcutt

Still hoping for some input. Anyone have this issue or know solutions? Thanks.

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Answer 4

Fortuny

Level 7

21,455 points

Apr 13, 2010 8:19 PM in response to Michael Northcutt

Hi Michael,

I still use Windows XP with my Mac but still never had such a problem with my two Firewire external HDs (one FW400 and one FW800).
And I did a lot of things with these 😉

Partioned one for use with OSX and Windows (one HFS+ partition; one NTFS partition); copied my complete MP3-collection (180GB) from one external HD to the other; etc.

All without any kind of glitch or slowdown.

To my knowledge Microsoft has completely rewritten the Firewire driver for Windows 7, so that could be one explanation, which might get better with the first Service Pack for Windows 7.

Also the Firewire support in Vista was 'flaky' to say the least.

But sorry no idea of a solution from my part.

Stefan

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Answer 5

Fortuny

Level 7

21,455 points

Apr 15, 2010 4:37 AM in response to Michael Northcutt

Hi again Michael,

just found this Microsoft article about Firewire and Windows 7 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;975500

Might be worth trying that "Hot-Fix".

Hope it helps

Stefan

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Answer 6

mrymill

Level 1

0 points

May 4, 2010 3:25 PM in response to Fortuny

I'm having similar issues to the original post - SUPER slow write speeds on an external NTFS firewire 800 hard drive. (Windows 7, iMac 27" i5) Just posted more info on my situation here:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11479129#11479129

Thanks for the Hot Fix link! I'll call MS support tonight and give that a go - will update if I have any news.

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Answer 7

May 18, 2010 11:36 AM in response to mrymill

Same problem here. The drive basically 'drops out'. I have tried two different firewire drives.

Interestingly, the drives work fine under OSX.

Windows error log reports a 'driver problem' with the device after it drops.

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Answer 8

The hatter

Level 9

60,980 points

May 18, 2010 12:38 PM in response to Michael Northcutt

Apple admits in one tech note to poor FW800 speeds on Mac Pro.

Hard to get rid of GPT but if you format the drive to MBR in Disk Utility and FAT you can then convert or reformat to NTFS.

No mention of the make of the case.

FW400 is pretty good. But why not use eSATA PCIe and SATA. Native if possible (no FW/USB type cases, or Oxford with multi interfaces). Works for me, using FW400 or Sonnet Tempo E2P or E4P (but not both together in Windows).

The hot fix wasn't that for XP or something?

Motherboards like Gigabyte are coming out with a dual-use port for SATA and USB3. FW seems like proprietary, not really adopted or supported outside Apple.

And I'd say there are problems with NTFS drivers for OS X so that is an issue.

Also, as nice as it may seem, Boot Camp's AppleHFS.sys and HFS+ support for read-only in Windows causes other problems and side effects, like Windows 7's Backup facility to not work.

When I get a drive, I use Windows and the vendor's (WD etc) hard drive diagnostic to do a full test, zero, etc and almost invariably drives formatted in Mac OS had trouble and worked better after such tests and formatting.

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