Monday 19 September 2011

Convert FAT32 to NTFS in MAC without WINDOWS

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How to convert external/internal FAT32 drive partition to NTFS with only a MAC



Long story:
Yes its the all not missed 5 year glitch with the hard disk and its all crashing down on you. Now its time to get my Mac OS back up and running which is the easy part (as usual). It is when you want the windows part as well which is the show stopper. Not sure what your unique case is but for me, I needed to switch my FAT32 partition to NTFS, and I did not have any windows installed with bootcamp to use the DOS command line. My cd-drive was faulty, so I could not use my Installer CD either, and I did not want the trouble of removing my drive physically just to bring it to a PC. Many searches online tell you to use Disk Utility in mac, but I CAN'T find that bl**dy NTFS partitioning option. Are they lying? No 3rd party commercial apps for me either.

Disk Utility with NTFS support


Long story short:
1. Download NTFS support, install, restart: http://www.tuxera.com/mac/ntfs-3g-2009.11.14u1-mac_2009-12-07_170539.dmg

2. Open Disk Utility (in mac of course), and *tada* you will now see the option to partition your drive in NTFS format

On a side note: I also recommend WinClone to conveniently archive a clone of your windows partition, makes it easy to backup and restore without re-installing and setup every time.

Note: Against user feedback on this post, I should point out that I was performing this on a fresh windows installation, so any existing windows data will be lost.

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