Thursday, February 21, 2008

NTFS-3G 1.2216

Information on what's new in ntfs-3g can be found at the NTFS-3G release page.

The only OS X-specific change for this release is how the new dialog boxes appear when a mount has failed. The new method will hopefully not block the Finder (I have had reports on the Finder locking up with inconsistent NTFS drives, though I haven't been able to confirm it), or make the startup screen go nuts after displaying an error message before login.

Download NTFS-3G 1.2216 [stable]
Download NTFS-3G 1.2216 [ublio]
(packaging by catacombae)
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4/10.5, a PowerPC or Intel computer, MacFUSE 1.3 or later installed.
This package has been tested with OS X 10.4.11/Intel and OS X 10.5.2/Intel.

Sources:
ntfs-3g 1.2216 (patched)
ntfsprogs 1.13.1
fuse_wait.c

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

The support for international characters such as åäöÅÄÖ seems to be malfunctioning in the previous release (havn't tested the last once since it's only the error message thats changed).

Files containing these chars isn't found when copying (by chronosync and others). Disk order copies the files, but replaces the chars with underscore.

Erik said...

Anonymous:

Please post a signature so I can identify followup comments. Otherwise it's impossible to distinguish between different "Anonymous"es.

I assume that you can view the åäöÅÄÖ characters when you browse the volume?
There is an incompatibility between NTFS and the Mac way of doing things, when it comes to Unicode. The frameworks of OS X (and most importantly, the Finder) expect all Unicode filenames to be decomposed, while Windows allows a mix of composed and decomposed characters.

I think it will work when you deal with these filenames in the Terminal, as the unix API:s don't enforce any such rules.

Addressing this issue, converting all precomposed characters to decomposed, is a solution which should work "most of the time", but what if the newly converted filename is identical to an already existing filename? And what composition form should a newly created unicode filename have?

I'm not very fond of this solution, and the problem really lies in OS X's frameworks, which are very HFS/HFS+-centric and not designed for other "strange" file systems.

The issue needs to be addressed, if at all, at pathname resolution level in ntfs-3g and I'm not that familiar with the code. You should request this from someone with more knowledge of the code.

Eloom123 said...

erik:

Are you aware of any issues ntfs-3g is having with Mac OS 10.5.2 (Intel)? I have found that when writing to my ntfs partition that files sometimes disappear. Other times the files copy over but are then corrupt when I try to open them. I have run Scan Disk on the drive (from Windows) and no errors were found on the drive. I have not found a way to reproduce the error, as most file copying seems to work.

I am getting a little weary of saving things to the ntfs volume, so far I have only lost a few PDF files that have been downloaded off the web, but I'm worried about losing actual data.

I have MacFUSE-Core-10.5-1.3.1 and NTFS-3G 1.2216 [stable] installed on Mac OS 10.5.2.

Any suggestions or ideas you have would be appreciated. I really appreciate the time and effort you put in to making ntfs volumes usable on the mac platform.

Fortunately I can access the mac drive from within windows to transfer files between the different partitions (as I recall I think I'm using another one of your programs for this task as well!).

Anonymous said...

On shutdown, after about 30+ seconds wait, Leopard says something like (quoting from memory):
Unable to kill ntfs-3g[pid], process didn't act on SIGTERM

Thanks.

Erik said...

Eloom123:

I can't investigate at this time as I'm on holiday in Thailand.

But yes, I have heard vague reports on problems with 10.5.2, but people have just been saying "it doesn't work", and that's not helpful. It works for me, and that's as far as I know.

Your problem report seems different. Does this problem occur only in 10.5.2, and not for instance in the 10.4 series of OS X?

Data corruption is something that I haven't ever experienced with the stable build. If you can reproduce it, we could try to diagnose the cause of the problem.

Erik said...

Anonymous, March 1, 2008 9:06 PM:

Yes, this issue is also on my list. The safest thing to do right now, if you're paranoid about losing data, is to unmount the ntfs partition before shutting down the mac. Otherwise it will get a SIGTERM and disk state might not be 100% consistent because of an unclean exit from ntfs-3g (more urgent with the ublio build than with the stable one).

Anonymous said...

Hello,

1.2310 released, can you update?
The CHKDSK bug are fixed :)

I had the problem in this version, that my Windows drive are mounted for 10-20 reboots and now it isn't possible(nothing changed on macfuse and ntfs-3g).

thanks
Raymond

Anonymous said...

I have a TrueCrypt encrypted file on a DVD+R. When I mount it READ-ONLY with TrueCrypt, I get a TrueCrypt error "hdiutil: attach failed - no mountable file systems" and an NTFS-3G error complaining about "Permission Denied... More explanation is provided at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#unprivileged"

I suspect that this is a NTFS-3g issue if any NTFS formated DMG or disc image on DVD-R fails to mount. If I can mount and read a NTFS-3G image (removing TrueCrypt from the equation) off DVD-R then this isn't your issue and I'll let the TrueCrypt people know. I'm working on testing this now.

I do need to mount TrueCrypt Volumes to restore files from my encrypted backups every now and again, and it would be nice to mount them read only and copy just the file, instead of copying over the 4.3G encrypted image, then mounting it, then restoring the one file I need.

Thanks for all your work!

Anonymous said...

Testing is done and it seems like the driver NEEDS to write to the image/partition and can't/won't mount it READ ONLY. This is what I did to test:

Created a 500M disk image.
Mounted it.
Formated it NTFS-3G.
Dropped some files in the dmg.
Unmounted it.
Burned it to CD-RW.
Tried to mount it directly from CD-RW.

Got the same errors with this process as I did before with TrueCrypt.

I also found a work-around of sorts; in the Tools directory you can enable and disable the NTFS-3G driver easily. It's not pretty, still a dozen or so steps to move a file from one Read Only NTFS partition to another NTFS partition that is writable, but it's better than copying 4.3G from DVD to my desktop every time I need a file.

Do you think the ability to mount read only images could be an enhancement or a fix?

Thanks again!

Anonymous said...

Hi Erik,

I have been happily using NTFS-3G 20070116-r4 with OSx 10.5.1. Then I downloaded an update to OSX10.5.2 now NTFS wont allow write access to NTFS. I have tried updating to the current NTFS-3G-1.2216(your release) but it still wont work. Any help to get it working again would be great.

Anonymous said...

^^^ scan your ntfs drive with scandisk in windows. i had the same problem and that fixed it.

Unknown said...

hi, iam using leopard 10.5.2, macfuse core-10.5-1.3.1 and NTFS-3G 1.2216. right i am trying to move a rather large file to my windows partition but whenever it is about ot finish, it tells me this:

"The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "XXXXXXXXXX" could not be read or written.
(Error code - 36)

any help appreciated =)

Mike said...

Hi Erik,

Appreciate the utility. Thanks.

I have a similar problem to Andrew's-- with the latest stable releases of MacFuse (1.3.1) and ntfs-3g (1.2216) on Leopard.

I have an NTFS xp boot camp partition, and I can make an image of it using disk image, but trying to mount this image gives me a 'no mountable file systems' permission denied error from ntfs-3g.

There's a link to http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#unprivileged - I tried the first workaround, but it didn't fix the permissions problem.

I'm also not able to uninstall the NTFS-3G package with the included uninstall script (it runs and says it completes successfully, but after rebooting ntfs-3g is still present to give me that permissions error message when I try to mount an NTFS disk image).

Any suggestions or thoughts on what may be going wrong?

Thanks,
Mike

Mike said...

(A quick note on the uninstall thing: turns out having a blank password breaks the shell script, though it says 'Process Completed' - changed it to a real password and ntfs-3g uninstalled without a hitch.)

Unknown said...

Anyway you can get it updated on the new release? 1.2310? 1.2216 has some bugs that cause my NTFS filesystem corrupt. Thanks

Anonymous said...

i was going through my activity monitor last night and noticed two ntfs-3g processes.. does everyone else have two running?

-interconnect

Erik said...

Anonymous, March 21, 2008 9:33 PM:

If you have two ntfs file systems mounted, there will be two ntfs-3g processes.

Erik said...

Anh:

What specific bugs are those? Sounds serious....
I've updated the package now, 1.2310 is out for OS X.

Anonymous said...

The fixed corruption wasn't serious. The redundantly stored size information of symlinks used for performance optimization was always set to 0 instead of the real size which is always irrelevant during metadata modifications because the real size is take from the primary place which was always correct.

I think a corruption problem comes from one of these sources:

- External USB devices can unexpectedly power down: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#ioerror
This is (or was, I don't track the status) a known OS X problem and Apple must fix it (if they didn't do so so far). This is file system independent.

- OS X sync() function doesn't sync to the device, only to its cache which can get lost. Apple should fix this too but it will take probably years if ever, so it would be much faster to workaround in NTFS-3G. Please note, all OS X programs are affected by this problem (Linux has the same bug and OS developers are fixing it right now).

- Unclean unmount. If the shutdown takes longer than 30 sec then this is the case.

Unknown said...

Szabolcs Szakacsits: In fact, it can be fixed in Windows. I think it comes from unclean mount.

However, the new version doesn't seem to help though. But thanks for the response. :)

Best,
Anh