So today I was having an issue with getting an external hard drive to be recognised on my Mac Pro.
The reason as it turns out was that the drive was not initialised and formatted and then it struck me, if I have a drive formatted on the PC as NTFS and want to read it while in OS X what do I need?
Well I hunted around and I found 2 options open to me, the first option I found was a commercail application called NTFS for Mac OS X from Paragon.
The other is an open source project now run by Google called MacFUSE.
NTFS for Mac OS X is $39.95 but you can trail it for 10 days. On the other hand MacFUSE is completely free.
This is the first time I came across MacFUSE but today I was pleasenty surprised to find that MacFUSE is actually included as part of VMware Fusion 2.0. Admittedly I am using RC1 so this may change but I hope not because this is really useful.
During the installation of VMware Fusion 2.0 RC1 you are prompted to install MacFUSE 1.5, installing MacFUSE enables you to open and read and write to VMware Fusion virtual machine disks with even needing to power up the Virtual Machne. This is of course dependnat on the fact that you either have Windows XP or Vista installed in a virtual macine.
There are lots of other cool features in Fusion 2.0 but I'l leave that for another posting.
Comments