Tuxera Developer

Q: Tuxera NTFS for Mac / NTFS-3G doesn't mount the drive, even though I installed it correctly.
Q: My NTFS drive is still read only, even after installing Tuxera NTFS for Mac / NTFS-3G.
Q: I'm unable to access my NTFS drive after installing Tuxera NTFS for Mac / NTFS-3G.
Q: 'It doesn't work!'
A: The most common reason why NTFS-3G or Tuxera NTFS for Mac doesn't mount an NTFS volume is that it contains errors or inconsistencies. These problems can occur if you detach a hard drive from a computer without unmounting it first ('Safe remove hardware' in Windows, the eject button next to the volume in Mac OS X). They can also occur if your operating system crashes, or if your computer otherwise shuts down abnormally.
To recover from this situation, attach the drive to a Windows computer and run 'chkdsk /f' on the drive to repair any problems in its internal structures. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265 for usage information regarding 'chkdsk'.
Q: I'm getting error -36 when copying file to the NTFS volume in Finder. Why, and how can I fix it?
A: Error -36 is a very general error and can mean lots of different things. Here are the most common causes of error -36:

• You are trying to explicitly copy AppleDouble files (starting with '._') to the NTFS volume. These files have a special meaning as bearers of Apple-specific metadata on non-Apple filesystems, and they shouldn't exist on Apple-provided file systems. There's a solution to this problem in the following thread: http://www.tuxera.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3300
• Some of the filenames that you're trying to copy are too large to be copied to the NTFS volume. This can sometimes happen with filenames with 200+ characters that contain 'international' characters (i.e. characters that lie outside the normal US/English character set).
• Your drive has internal inconsistency issues. In this case you should get error messages in your system.log file. This problem is fixed by running 'chkdsk' in Windows as described above.
• Your drive has bad sectors. This should normally also trigger error messages in system.log. 'chkdsk' in Windows is often able to discover and mark these bad sectors if you supply the '/r' parameter.
  If you have bad sectors on your hard drive, you should rescue your data and replace your drive as soon as possible.

Q: Why does all NTFS drives disappear from the 'Startup Disk' preference pane after installing Tuxera NTFS for Mac / NTFS-3G?
A: Apple does not allow any volumes that are mounted with third party file system drivers to appear in the 'Startup Disk' preference pane. This is hard coded, and something that we cannot change.
However, there are numerous alternative methods for booting into Windows:

• Hold down the Option key during boot (or Alt for non-Apple keyboards).
  This brings up a boot menu where you can choose which volume to start your computer from.
• Install the rEFIt boot manager for better control of the boot process.
• Disable Tuxera NTFS for Mac / NTFS-3G (using the preference pane), unmount your NTFS volume with Disk Utility and mount it again.
  Your volume will now be mounted with Apple's read-only NTFS driver, and the 'Startup Disk' preference pane will behave as usual. Make sure to reenable Tuxera NTFS for Mac / NTFS-3G afterwards.
• Use the command line utility bless to set the disk that should be used as default startup disk (see man bless for more information).

Q: Does Tuxera NTFS for Mac work with TrueCrypt, VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, .. ?
A: Yes, all of the above have been tested to some extent. If you encounter a situation where it does not work for you, then it's a bug and should be reported to us, via email or a forum post describing the problem.
Q: How do I create a metadata image of my NTFS volume that I can send to the developers to aid in troubleshooting?
A: We have written a special application for this purpose which can be downloaded here: http://www.tuxera.com/mac/ntfsmetaclone-1.1.dmg
Updated 2009-12-31 (version 1.1): Improved Snow Leopard support and fixes for temporary GUI lockup bugs when extracting.
Usage instructions:

1. Download and open the disk image (see above).
2. Start the application by double clicking the icon 'Extract NTFS metadata' inside the attached disk image.
3. Select the device that your NTFS volume resides on (you can look this up in Disk Utility's 'Info' window).
4. Make sure that the volume that you're trying to extract metadata from is not mounted (i.e. unmount it in Disk Utility).
5. Press the 'Extract metadata' button.
6. Specify an output filename in the following save file dialog.
7. Authenticate as an administrator to allow the metadata cloning utility to gain access to the disk device.

Now the program will start cloning the device metadata to the specified file.

Joined: Fri Sep 21, 2007 12:05
Posts: 1

NTFS volume does not work in windows vista

Hey,
I used ntfs-3g in gentoo for a while now and it works absolutely great! After a few weeks I booted vista, but my ntfs partition does not show. Disk management does not recognize it as a NTFS partition.
I've also tried to format in Vista and then mount in Gentoo in a distant past, but that I can't mount in Gentoo.
Any ideas?
-Thanks

Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2006 23:15
Posts: 1648

It sounds like a Windows problem. Please submit a bug report to Microsoft.

I ran into a similar problem. I've used ntfs-3g for a long time without any problems at all (thanks for all the hard work). This week I got a bigger hard drive, and proceeded to mount it with ntfs-3g and copy all the contents of the older hard drive to it (~240gb). Upon my next reboot to Vista, I discovered that Vista would not let me use the drive, and would see it as 'RAW' instead of ntfs partition under disk manager.
The files are still readable under linux but ntfs-3g now refuses to mount it without the force option. At first, it told me that the filesystem was still flagged as 'in use' by Windows. I removed the mount point in windows to see if it would help, and it didn't. Then when I used the force option to mount it, it now tells me that the 'Volume is scheduled for check. Please boot into Windows TWICE, or use the 'force' mount option'. It still mounts fine if the force option is used.
Booting into windows twice doesn't help (it does run chkdsk, it finds no errors). I've ran chkdsk /r manually, it recognizes it as an NTFS drive, and finds no errors, but disk manager still tells me it's a raw partition, and I can't access the files. I've tried running ntfsfix too, also didn't help. Also, regardless of how many times I run chkdsk, ntfs-3g still tells me that the volume is scheduled for check.
I'm running Gentoo,
ntfs-3g version 1.81
fuse 2.7.0
kernel 2.6.22
only relevant things in /var/log/messages do not seem to help, but here they are:

Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2006 23:15
Posts: 1648

You can ignore the 'scheduled for check' warnings. It is handled in the recent NTFS-3G drivers without any manual invention. You're using an older driver: http://ntfs-3g.org/releases.html.
As for the Vista RAW partition issue, that can be MBR or partition table corruption which could be caused by a boot manager, partitioner, virus, rootkits, etc. These are independent of the filesystem and Linux ignores them that's why NTFS keeps working on Linux and chkdsk doesn't find problems.

Thanks for the reply. I completely cleared the mbr and rebuilt my partition table with gpart and fdisk, but the problem continues.
However, since chkdsk isn't finding any problems and I can still access all my files, I think you're right and the problem isn't with ntfs-3g. Thanks again for your suggestion and for telling me it's safe to use the force option. I'll just bite the bullet, backup, and rebuild.

Could it be that the new Vista is trying to make bugs when another ntfs manager than Windows has been used?
Knowing the control philosophy of Vista it wouldnt surprise me.

Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2006 23:15
Posts: 1648

I'm 99% sure that this can't be the case. Otherwise companies could sue Microsoft for $$$$$$$$$$$. EU did this recently. The fine was over a billion $US.

I always wondered how do you do that.
Is there a public bug tracking system ?
(feel free to reply off list, err.. off thread)

You don't 'report a bug' per se, you go to their support page and contact tech support with your problem. I imagine that it gets reported as a potential bug if they can't fix it. At least I'm hoping that's the case, I've just sent them an e-mail.
I booted my computer with a BartPE disc and it read that partition just fine, no problems at all, confirming the ntfs file system is perfectly fine and the problem is some weird type of vista bug. So I don't think I even have to rebuild the partition, I'm just going to go back to XP if tech support can't help me out.

Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2006 23:15
Posts: 1648

Thanks TrekkieGod! Please let us know how it goes.

I can confirm this problem . I have ubuntu/xp/vista triple boot . My e: seems to be the only drive i have written data through ntfs-3g ( other drives were mounted as rw but hardly written anything in linux ) . Drive is working perfectly in Windows XP . In vista chkdsk recognises it as ntfs drive and reports clean with no error but explorer in vista shows 'file or directory is corrupted and unreadable' . I have tried it with Vista x64/x86 and Vista x86 SP1 same issues on all . I am banging my head now :(

Your reporting of every NTFS-3G incompatibility with Windows as being a MS bug is unhelpful. From observing your flippant attitude in the forums here, I'm starting to get the opinion that you're not actually interested in developing an NTFS driver - you seem more interested in developing a Linux driver inspired along NTFS lines, but with no actual compatibility requirement.
With the greatest respect, I think you need to reevaluate what your users need.

I think the reason is that there is still some tiny differences between ntfs-3g driver and MS's NTFS driver which xp ignores but vista thinks is a mistake.

windows 2000 was NTFS version 3.0.
windows xp and vista are ntfs version 3.1.
anything before that could be 1.2, 1.1 or 1.0.
there appear to be feature differences between them according the the microsoft KB's, which means probably structural differences.
to tell from windows what fs you have, do
fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:
I get for my XP SP3 the following:
NTFS Volume Serial Number : 0xXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Version : 3.1
Number Sectors : 0x0000000024bcff10
Total Clusters : 0x0000000004979fe2
Free Clusters : 0x0000000001cf9d95
Total Reserved : 0x0000000000000054
Bytes Per Sector : 512
Bytes Per Cluster : 4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length : 0x0000000052128000
Mft Start Lcn : 0x00000000000c3cd4
Mft2 Start Lcn : 0x00000000003f87c5
Mft Zone Start : 0x0000000004280ce0
Mft Zone End : 0x00000000042f2880

Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2006 23:15
Posts: 1648

We know the NTFS 3.x formats for over 5 years. File system development and interoperability is not woodoo or guess work but computer science what we take seriously: http://ntfs-3g.org/quality.html
There can be millions of reasons why Windows can't recognize a disk. Many are completely unrelated to the file system. People have these issues all the time even if they never used Linux. In such cases the very first step to take is to get detailed error message from Windows.

Are there any differences between the NTFS from fdisk and the Windows' NTFS versions?

Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2006 23:15
Posts: 1648

fdisk is a partitioner and NTFS is a file system. They can't be compared, they are different things.

I'm pretty sure this is triggered by a problem in NTFS-3G. I copied some files to the root of an NTFS partition and after that, Vista considered it as RAW.
In http://forum.ntfs-3g.org/viewtopic.php?t=888 it is claimed that RAW means bad MBR/partition table, and as MBR/partition table is above NTFS-3G, thus NTFS-3G is not responsible.
I'm convinced however, that the Vista Disk Manager checks some of the partition itself for corruption (probably just the root folder and some of the hidden NTFS files - $Entries etc) as part of the process of determining the partition type, and considers a 'corrupt' NTFS partition as RAW.
My logic for thinking this is:
XP still sees it as NTFS (and works with it to an extent, although it did complain that $Entires was corrupt whilst I was backing up the files). Also, Vista's command line FS utils (chkdsk and fsutil) both see it as NTFS, but subsequently report that 'D: is corrupt or unreadable'
I simply didn't write to the MBR - I was running on Linux as a priviledge limited user and didn't use fdisk or any other partition editor. Obviously this isn't something I can say 100% as any number of things can go wrong with these things, but I'm as sure as I can be that all I did was write files to the root folder.
If you want some further help tracking this down, then I'll be happy to do so.
I was thinking it might be related to locales or something, though the filenames I wrote were all plain ASCII, AFAIK.
Many thanks.

Joined: Tue Sep 04, 2007 17:22
Posts: 1286

Hi,
For your experience to be useful, you should give more details :
- how was your partition formatted (which OS, which formatter and version) ?
- how did you use it ? (rw in ntfs-3g and XP, then switch to Vista ?)
- what triggered the first error ? was it after creating a file on the root of the file system ?
- what are the exact error messages ? (in what message did you see a reference to $Entries ?)
Also, should the problem be related to creating files on the root of the file system, have you tried to move them elsewhere ?
Regards
Jean-Pierre

To try on the safe mode to check your hard drive.
I think it will help.
Alex.
http://www.soft-windows.com/