How to Access OSX drives from Windows

If you have a disk or partition of windows that you boot from and you need to access your files (images, music, movies, etc.) on the Leopard or any other OSX drive then read on.

for this purpose you need to use MacDrive application, this application is installed on windows and can display Macintosh Hard Drives inside "My Computer" as if they are normal windows partitions, you can read, write, change and even delete files if you must.

the installation is very simple (next,next,next), and after it is done you reboot and you can access your OSX drives from the hackintosh dual boot, or from USB external Time-Machine.

1. download MacDrive
2. from windows install MacDrive
3. reboot into windows (make sure Mac drives are connected)

thats it, the MacDrives will be marked with a special icon indicating they are Mac and not simple windows HD.
after the install "My Computer" should looks like this:


Enjoy.

How to Access NTFS (R/W access) from OSX

this post is written due to a readers question (i added the email and the response as a comment to this post),
he was having problems writing to NTFS (Windows Hard Drives), if you have dual boot or connecting USB Hard Drives that have NTFS File System and want to access it from within OSX for writing purposes then read on.

if the HD is plugged or mounted after the system has loaded (for instance a USB disk on key) then you get a read/write access and can do whatever you wish to that USB Flash Drive.

but if you have a Disk connected and already have an NTFS file system on it then it will be auto mounted at boot time but it will give you read only access. for instance i have a vista partition dual booting with OSX and from within OSX it looks like this:



so what you need to do is to install two simple utilities:
MacFUSE (Mac File-System User-Space) it support the file system of many kind in a kernel-level so they integrate from the OSX almost natively.
NTFS-3G a driver that support the linux FUSE spec and can be run on-top of the MacFUSE Plugin and support the NTFS from within Mac OSX.

the steps are very easy:
1. download MacFUSE
2. run MacFUSE Core.pkg
3. download NTFS-3g (make sure to download the "Mac OS X DMG Package")
4. mount the DMG file
5. run NTFS-3G.pkg
6. restart

thats it, the final result should look like any other drive like this:



if you would like to uninstall NTFS-3G follow these steps:

1. from the NTFS-3g DMG execute the script: "Uninstall NTFS-3G.command"
2. press "Open" on the appearing popup
3. in the terminal that appear enter your password and press enter
4. wait until this message appears: [Process completed] and then you can close the terminal
   

if you would like to uninstall MacFUSE follow these steps:

1. open a new terminal and write: sudo -s (and press enter)
2. enter your password and press enter
3. paste these two lines and press enter after each one of them
4. lsbom -fls /Library/Receipts/MacFUSE\ Core.pkg/Contents/Archive.bom | colrm 1 1 | xargs rm -v
5. rm -rv /Library/Receipts/MacFUSE\ Core.pkg
6. reboot
   

your computer will come up without NTFS-3G and without MacFUSE.

here are the Install screenshots in case you need them:

MacFuse Install Screen Shots:










and the NTFS-3G Install Screenshots:









Enjoy.