Options for reading a dynamically NTFS drive in OS X
Hi everyone,
I seem to have gotten myself into quite the sticky situation. I am studying abroad this semester, and at the last minute thought it would be a good idea to pop a secondary hard drive from my desktop PC into an external enclosure and bring it with me, because it has my music library, tv shows, etc to remind me of home while I'm away.
Unfortunately, the enclosure arrived at 7:00 PM the night before I was to leave. At around 9:00 when I realized that OS X would not read the drive, it was too late... I had no time to get my PC up and running and figure the problem out.
Here is what I have discovered so far:
The drive is formatted dynamic NTFS
I have tried plugging it in to a number of Windows laptops that I have access to here, and the drive shows up under disk management, but will not come up in My Computer. It is listed as "foreign" in disk management.
What I am wondering is if there is any way for me to read this drive natively on OS X (which I doubt), or if I can run windows in parallels and try to access the drive, or if there is a solution to this problem which I haven't thought up yet?
Some more time with the drive on a PC would be helpful, but I have a hard time convincing my fellow students to part with their laptops for hours on end.
Any advice, suggestions, help anyone could offer would be immensely appreciated. I also already tried installing WinXP in boot camp, but the boot camp assistant tells me that it is unable to partition the drive because some files cannot be moved... so for now, that's out.
Thanks in advance!!!
I seem to have gotten myself into quite the sticky situation. I am studying abroad this semester, and at the last minute thought it would be a good idea to pop a secondary hard drive from my desktop PC into an external enclosure and bring it with me, because it has my music library, tv shows, etc to remind me of home while I'm away.
Unfortunately, the enclosure arrived at 7:00 PM the night before I was to leave. At around 9:00 when I realized that OS X would not read the drive, it was too late... I had no time to get my PC up and running and figure the problem out.
Here is what I have discovered so far:
The drive is formatted dynamic NTFS
I have tried plugging it in to a number of Windows laptops that I have access to here, and the drive shows up under disk management, but will not come up in My Computer. It is listed as "foreign" in disk management.
What I am wondering is if there is any way for me to read this drive natively on OS X (which I doubt), or if I can run windows in parallels and try to access the drive, or if there is a solution to this problem which I haven't thought up yet?
Some more time with the drive on a PC would be helpful, but I have a hard time convincing my fellow students to part with their laptops for hours on end.
Any advice, suggestions, help anyone could offer would be immensely appreciated. I also already tried installing WinXP in boot camp, but the boot camp assistant tells me that it is unable to partition the drive because some files cannot be moved... so for now, that's out.
Thanks in advance!!!
Comments
Here's one (highly dangerous) way to do this: http://www.tech-faq.com/blog/convert...rase-data.html
Sounds like you've got a bit of a chicken and egg problem though...
What I am wondering is if there is any way for me to read this drive natively on OS X (which I doubt), or if I can run windows in parallels and try to access the drive, or if there is a solution to this problem which I haven't thought up yet?
Parallels can do this so you can experiment with it. I'd probably use native Bootcamp when dealing with low level devices though. You don't want Parallels crashing out or freezing during a drive operation.
Any advice, suggestions, help anyone could offer would be immensely appreciated. I also already tried installing WinXP in boot camp, but the boot camp assistant tells me that it is unable to partition the drive because some files cannot be moved... so for now, that's out.
This is to do with fragmentation. Use iDefrag or if you have a spare external, clone to an external, format and clone back. iDefrag will likely be quicker.
Once you get native Windows up and running, you should be able to use the built-in system tools, possibly command-line tools to change the drive from dynamic.