Unduly Noted

EDIT: This is also working ok on the final beta build of 10.6 snow leopard. Will keep you posted about the release.

This is an oldie but the software has gotten better from back when I first used it. So the problem exists that you want to swap a drive between mac and windows. Naturally you think Fat32, and you would be correct. But you have a DVD.iso image that is greater than the 4 gig file size limit of Fat32. If only the mac could write to NTFS.

3 Step install process.

Install MacFUSE (from google)
Install NTFS-3G (If the link is broken just do a search for it)
If this post is older than a few months check out the official blog for the links to the latest packages (macntfs-3g)
Reboot the machine.

All your NTFS drives will be full read/write capable in mac os x.
WARNING:
Sometimes if you force reboot windows on your mac or it shuts down improperly (bootcamp) the NTFS drive will not mount on the Mac OS X side anymore. An easy fix to this is to just reboot into windows and make sure it shuts down properly.

BONUS:
This also gives you the ability to format a disk from mac os x to NTFS-3G that works in windows of course. Just open disk utility, click on the disk on the left hand pane (the disk not the partition) you want to partition, select the partition tab and choose how many partitions you would like from the drop down. Pull down the “Format” drop down and click “Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G). If you plan to make this bootable make sure you click the options button at the bottom of the page and choose “Master Boot Record”. Done.

If you are running windows and want to read mac drives (HFS) the best solution I know of is mediafour’s Macdrive7 (mac drive 7). Cost is $49 as of this posting and it really works well. Gives you several options for filename compatibility when transferring, plus many more.