Peter Stagg dot com – the blog

The recent purchase of a WD TV mini media player to keep the Munchkin amused has sent me scurrying back to the dark side. For the life of me I could not get the cute little bugger (the WD TV mini not the Munchkin) to recognise a HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) formatted hard drive, even though the (RT)FM said it should be OK. FAT(32) is obviously not an option when moving around 4GB+ plus files (iso images) so I think, Ah Ha!, NTFS |-( [sad face].

Well I’ve got MacFUSE and NTFS-3G so no problems, right? Wrong! Because I also use a Snow Leopard Server install running 64-bit Kernel and Extensions. The first sign of this was messages like “fusefs.kext… failed to load” and “libkern/kext… link error”. So off to the new improved Google (nice and clean like the old days) I go.

Well there is a lot of chatter out there about this problem on official and unofficial forums but not much of it seemed to solve my particular problem until I came across the three pieces of the puzzle that put together a complete picture.

1. 1) The latest version of NTFS-3G – forgive me if this part is misleading. In the back of my head I have the notion that I downloaded a 64 bit version of NTFS-3G but if I did I can’t find where I got it from so I’m assuming that all I actually did was install the most up-to-date version.
2. 2) 64bit MacFUSE preference pane Posted by Amit Singh [Ref] – Not essential but it does get rid of that annoying lane change between the 64 bit and 32 bit preference panels.
3. 3) 64bit Unofficial MacFUSE install – The last and most important piece of the puzzle – Tomas Carnecky has posted an Unofficial MacFUSE 64bit compilation of MacFUSE on caurea.org which seems to work like brought one from my limited testing so far.