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I just upgraded a brand new Macbook Pro that I bought with 10.5 installed to Snow Leopard.

After doing the upgrade I am trying to access NTFS partitions on my external hard drive but they are just not showing up. I went ahead and installed Windows 7 using Parallels, and I can access the NTFS partitions from within Windows, but not from Mac OS X. I know that Snow Leopard should be able to at least read NTFS drives, so what is going on here?

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Do those NTFS partitions show up in Disk Utility? – deddebme Sep 14 '09 at 5:35
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As a temporary solution until you can get NTFS to natively work, I suggest using MacFuse and ntfs3g (I've used them in Leopard and the experience is pretty seamless). To be honest, I'm pretty sure that's what Apple uses in Snow Leopard anyway. They are free, mature, open-source projects, that are also used in various Linux distributions to enable the NTFS read/write capability.

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Hi, That did not work either. I had to repartition the external hard drive. But in the process I ended up losing some data that I forgot was there. Now I've spent 12 hours trying to figure out a way to recover the data. DataRescue II can identify most of my files, except that it doesn't recognize the folder hierarchy and it also doesn't recover any Visual Studio files (.cs, .csproj, .sln, etc) – dtmunir Sep 14 '09 at 19:32
That did not work? Strange, I've been using this for more than a year now, without any problems. I hope you didn't lose data because of my recommendation. – alex Sep 14 '09 at 19:38
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up vote 0 down vote

Under Windows's Device Manager, do you see the drives? Are they active?

If they are disabled / de-activated, they won't be seen or shown... I do this with my Mac partitions, since I don't want the Windows Antivirus software to be scanning those drives, nor allow a virus to damage those drives, if I do get infected.

Opps, misread the question...

Does Disk Utility see the drives? If so, what partition type is shown? Are you sure it's a NTFS partition? Did you ever install NTFS3G on your system? It could be conflicting with the standard NTFS drivers...

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