Mac No Longer Sees My Windows NTFS Formated Disk

[daveporter]

I have three hard disk drives installed in my Mac Pro. One is formated for Mac use and holds OSX. I used Boot Camp to designate the second driver totally for use in Windows. I had the WindowsXP Pro install disk formate this drive for NTFS during the Windows install. I had OSX format the third drive for FAT32 so that I could have all my work files stored on this disk and then have both OSX and WindowsXP utilize the files since both operating systems can see a FAT32 formated drive.

When I first installed WindowsXP I did not have the third drive; just the disk formated for OSX and NTFS. After the Windows install everything was fine; OSX saw the NTFS disk and recognised it as such. Then, after I added the third drive today and had OSX formate it for FAT32, OSX no longer recognises the NTFS disk and reports that the drive is unregonizable each time OSX restarts and askes if I want to initialize it, ignore it or erase it. I hit ignore and OSX boots and the drive no longer mounts.

If I go to System Preferences and select the Startup Disk applet it no longer sees the Windows startup item; only the OSX and Network startup items are listed now.

At this point, when I reboot and hold down the Option Key, both OSX and Windows still show and I can start either OS without any problem.

Does anyone know what might be going on here? Any insight into what is happening and possible resolutions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Dave

 

[BadRambo]

I have the same setup you do, and it works fine.

First, I would suggest that you use the OSX drive utility to ERASE the third drive to HFS format. Then use the drive utility to generate a SINGLE partition of FAT32. BEFORE you do all of this, take out the Windows disk drive. The system should boot from the OSX drive into OSX and you should be able then to use the utility to erase and partition the other drive. I have done this arrangement several ways, and it usually works quite well.

Good Luck -- Bob ---

 

[daveporter]

New Information

I believe that I may have caused the Mac to no longer recognise the NTFS formated Windows drive. I used PerfectDisk to defragment and optimize the placement of the files on the NTFS drive (as I always do on regular PC machines and servers after a new install) just before the Mac first reported that it no longer recognised the NTFS driver for the first time.

Does anyone know if Boot Camp places some type of file on the Windows drive that it uses to recognise NTFS and Fat32 formated drives? If so, does anyone know if this file must stay where it was originally placed by OSX for it to see the drive?

I have not defragemented the new third Fat32 drive since I am concerned that it may cause OSX to loose the ability to see it. If the Fat32 and NTFS drives can not be defragmented on a Mac without a loosing the ability to see them this is going to be a problem on a workstation where many files are deleted and added and moved each day because the drives will have to be defragmented at some point or performance will suffer greatly.

Dave

 

[daveporter]

Does Anyone Have Any Thoughts About This?

BadRambo,

I gave your fix a try; however, it did not have any effect on the problem with OSX no longer being able to see my NTFS Windows startup drive. Thanks for your input non-the-less! I appreciate it.

Any one else have any thoughts?

Dave