How to use MacFuse to share an external hard drive with your Mac and PC

Google's MacFuse application is simple to install and use that makes an external hard drive able to be shared between a Mac and PC seamlessly.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A Mac
• A PC
• An External Hard Drive
• Administrator Privileges on both computers
• 5 Minutes

1. Start with a new or newly formatted (as ntfs) hard drive.

2. On your Mac:
   Go to http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ and download the disk image (dmg) file.

3. Once the download is complete; double click the dmg file from your default download location (usually your download folder or desktop). When the folder opens, double click the MacFUSE.pkg file.

4. During the MacFuse install you will be prompted to agree and continue without the need to change any option.
   
   In the first screen; Choose "continue."
   
   On the next screen click "continue"
   
   Click "Continue"
   
   Click "Agree"
   
   Then Click "Install"
   
   At this point your Mac will ask for authentication (user name & password).
   Enter it and click "ok"
   
   you should then be informed that the install was successful.

5. Go to http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-read-and-write-ntfs-windows-partition-on-mac-os-x.html and download the NTFS-3G Read/Write Driver (I Prefer the stable version)

6. Once downloaded, double click the dmg file. Then double click the NTFS-3G.pkg

7. This installer will also ask for a series of "continues"
   
   Click "Continue"
   
   Click "Continue"
   
   Click "Agree"
   
   Click "Install"
   
   Enter your password, click "ok"
   
   The installer will then ask you to restart your computer.

8. After the restart your Mac will be able to read and write to your ntfs formatted hard drive.

Tips & Warnings

• These instructions were created for Mac OS X 10.5, on a PowerPC or Intel computer
• Files with filenames created in Windows containing international characters with accents, umlauts and similar dots and lines, or filenames with korean characters might seem unreadable in the Finder. This is because Finder apparently expects all filenames to appear in unicode decomposed form, while NTFS allows both composed and decomposed form filenames. This issue is hard to solve in a pretty way, but you should still be able to access these files when using the Terminal. For me, copying the affected files to a HFS+ drive using the command "cp" worked fine.

Resources

• MacFuse Download
• NTFS-3g Driver