Writing to NTFS drives from Mac and SSH

AndersHP

Hi all

I'm running my roms off a NTFS formatted USB stick, in order to get some symlinks to work in RetroPie. Problem is, my computer is a Mac and these really don't want to write to NTFS anymore.

Back in the day, a simple command-hack from Terminal made it possible to write to NTFS drives, but nowadays it seems I either have to pay for an app to do it, or use MacFuse, which apparently involves temporarily turning off security things and whatnot.

I also experience that I cannot write to the drive via SSH anymore, Filezilla just queues the file and nothing happens.

So to transfer a Rom, I have to dust off my old pc laptop everytime and physically remove my USB drive from my Pi...

There must be a simpler way - anyone knows how?

My setup is a RPi 3b+ running RetroPie 4.4 and my Mac runs OSX El Capitan 10.11.6

Thanks in advance :)

mitu

@AndersHP said in Writing to NTFS drives from Mac and SSH:

There must be a simpler way - anyone knows how?

Format the drive as FAT32/ExtFAT and macOS will not have a problem with it. Any reason why you chose NTFS as the file system ?

AndersHP

@mitu
Yes, NTFS is chosen to get meleu's emulator-based launch image script to work.

This way, all my arcade games can be stored in the Arcade folder, but still have FBA/MAME/ADVMAME specific launch images, which I think is very cool.

AndersHP

@AndersHP
No tips on how to do this a cool way?

Clyde

As a long-time Linux user, I am baffled every time how much hassle Windows and OSX make with foreign (and in the case of Linux, open source) file systems, while Linux will happily read and write NTFS (stable since 2007) and HFS+ (with disabled journal). Apple's new APFS (Apple File System) seems to make some trouble yet, thanks to its closed proprietary nature.

So, the coolest and probably most practical way from my slightly *cough* biased perspective would be to use Linux as a mediator, since it should read and write both file systems involved, as long as you're using HFS+ instead of APFS.

Although you can install Linux next to MacOS, it involves some handywork (example). Only you can know if this is worth it just to transfer some files. But then again, once configured it would make dusting off your old pc obsolete. ;)

Alternatively, you could try to use HFS+ on your USB drive instead of NTFS. According to raspberrypi.org, Raspbian supports HFS+ out of the box. If Retropie, which is based on Raspbian, doesn't, the command sudo apt install hfsplus hfsprogs should install the necessary drivers and tools.

Finally, if your drive is formatted with APFS, Raspian/Retropie may be made to access it read-only.

Nothing of this is childsplay, but you asked for a cool way, not an easy one. ;)

Disclaimer: I have no experience in actually doing any of this. The times when I had to read from the HFS+ disks of a friend of mine from time to time are long since gone.

Ashpool

What's about samba-shares?

cyperghost

@Ashpool the question is not data sharing - it's the capability of using symbolic links. The question was answered in the back topic

Sj0

@AndersHP check out Mounty. I use it for the Mac a lot of time and seems to work really well. https://mounty.app/ hope this will help you!