NTFS on Mac
The problem why Windows on a Mac was a pain in the ass is roughly the following:
- If you use Bootcamp & an NTFS partition, you won't be able to access your Windows data from OS X
- If you use Bootcamp & an Fat32 partition, you could access your data, but the installation will abort with an hardware abstraction layer (hal.dll) error (also see this german blog)
- If you delete the 200mb partition, you can get over the HAL-error, but you're not able to remove the Win partition with the Bootcamp assistent anymore.
That was the dilemma... lose the flexibility to remove the Win partition easily, or don't be able to access your data. Until google published Mac FUSE which stands for File-system in USEr space. If you have some knowledge about the architecture of an operating system: this is a driver (running in kernel mode) allowing to use file system implementations in user mode, as the name suggests. But the really interesting feature is its implementation of a Linux file system API, making Linux file system adaptations ready to use on a mac. Amongst other [rethorical pause] NTFS!
Which solves us the problem described above. First install MacFUSE, and then the NTFS 3G driver and enjoy hasselfree Windows!
