5 Essential Tools for running windows in Macbook
Months back I switched from Windows to MAC. I have used MAC during my college days and I am quite comfortable with browsing through the system but not completely. I initally had MAC OS X Tiger and later I upgraded the same to Lepoard. When I slowly started using MAC, the first problem I faced is reading and writing NTFS drives and second problem is reading and writting to my MAC drive from my bootcamp windows. Here I want to discuss about some the best tools from my point of view when you use windows in Macbook
Windows for MAC
I faced this problem when I tried to access my external NTFS formatted USB drives. So I here by want to pen down about some of the tools which may help you to solve this problem.
FUSE, File System in User Space that helps in mounting filesystems and resources like GMail, Flickr etc in Linux. It was actually created for MAC and later ported to BSD. FUSE enables you to mount and work on the remote filesytems. This enabled Linux to mount and work with network filesystems like NTFS. A year back Google came to rescue Macintosh users by introducing MAC FUSE, a mac version for FUSE. Mac FUSE currently supports shfs, ntfs-3g (read/write NTFS), ftpfs (read/write FTP), etc. Read more about Mac FUSE here. To have read and write access in MAC, you have to try ntfs-3g for MAC and for a step by step guide read this. Also there are few open source tools that works with MAC FUSE which gives a new dimension to this. If you need a tool or GUI that works with MAC FUSE to mount remote filesystems using SSH then you can go for MacFusion. Read How-TO for MAC FUSE here.
Paragon NTFS is one good tool that will help you to read and write NTFS partitions with ease. Anybody can easily install and straight away start using it. This software is not free and you can get it for 39.95$. The beauty of this tool is, you can access the NTFS partition as your native drive and file transfer and operations is nothing but a cake walk. I have tried this tool personally and it is really good for beginners. Paragon has also released NTFS for Linux 6.0 which I expect to be as good as this one.
Mac for Windows
When I upgraded my Mac OS X Tiger to Lepoard I wanted to give a try for OS X Bootcamp. I was using windows in my OS X Tiger using Parallels but I got bugged up with its performance after some time. So I just wanted to go for windows with bootcamp and I successfully installed it. Unfortunately I am not able to access my Apple drives. Oh my God! Parallels does all mounting job for me by itself but with boot camp I have to do something about it. So I again started looking for some good tools that can help me to get out of this issue.
Mac Drive is one of the tools I appreciate a lot. With this tool you can read and write to Mac formatted HFS parititions. MAC Drive comes with a disk manager which helps you to repair and analyse Mac disk drives and you can partition the same in MAC OS X Extended HFS file system with ease. MAC Drive will give you a big helping hand if you are using bootcamp. If you are using Parallels or Microsoft’s VMWare then you dont need this tool.
TransMAC is also a very useful tool that will help you to read and write MAC disks from windows. This is very similar to MAC Drive and will be useful only if you have bootcamp otherwise you may not require this one. Trans Mac also has got facitlities to partition drives into HFS. You can also burn MAC Formatted CD/DVDs, ISOs, DMGs and other disk images with the help of built in burner software that now comes with dual-layer support. Trans Mac proves to be good with the buring capabilitiesof Mac in Windows.
MAC Disk is also one more tool that will help you to read, write and format MAC Disks on an IBM compatible PC. I have not personally used this tool and I have got no idea about it. You can give it a try.
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