OSX - USB HDD (NTFS)

beardboy · 29 Nov 2009

Sorry about the title - couldn't think what to put.

I have a USB HDD plugged into my Mac at the moment. I was browsing files on it earlier and suddenly an entire folder prob around 300GB vanished. According to OSX it's still in use, but i can't see it and spotlight brings up nothing.

Is there any way to run a Chkdsk or similar in OSX on an NTFS partition? I've tweaked my snow leopard so that i can read/write to NTFS partitions without any 3rd party software, so i should have access.

I've also tried going into Disk Utility and seeing if i can verify disk, but that's greyed out...

Oh, and i've also gone into Windows 7 VMware to see if i could browse to them, but they're empty on that too.

Cheers

Any suggestions?

djs · 29 Nov 2009

might sound silly, but have you tried restarting? just to make sure there are no other programs using the files. because you mentioned OSX saying the files are in use

otherwise, chkdsk would probably work, i recently had 8 files go missing on a 500gb external HD, it took 12 hours to scan, but it worked. You should be able to do it via VMware

beardboy · 30 Nov 2009

Hi,

I've tried restarting a couple of times, but other files on the disk are fine and accessible. When i say files are in use, i don't mean actually in use. lol

What i mean is that the drive is still available.

Thanks

djs · 30 Nov 2009

I see. Well if you can run windows, then my recommendation would be a chkdsk, I'd leave it running overnight.
It might not work if you've recently wrote to the HDD after the files went missing, but worth a try.

beardboy · 30 Nov 2009

Thanks.

That's my next port of call really, i'll see if i can do it using VMWare, as i don't own a Windows machine anymore.

I've not written anything to the HDD since them vanishing, so hopefully everything will still be there.

Thanks again.

thehitmen · 30 Nov 2009

Do you have to use NTFS? Could you not just use OSX journaled

beardboy · 30 Nov 2009

I could, but as the HDD was from the days of Windows, it's still in the same format it was in back then, as i've not got enough free space on my other drives to backup everything, then format it and start again.

Peter_Hartland · 1 Dec 2009

I have run CHKDSK on a NTFS drive from VMWare Fusion and XP. Just upgraded to Fusion 3 & WIndows 7 so havent tried that out yet will have a go tonight.