HFS+ disk shows up as NTFS. Huh?

[^Tripper^]

My apologies if this has been discussed but a search did not turn up this issue.

I'm using the RT87 with OS X Yosemite. I've formatted an external HD (seagate backup plus 4TB) as HFS+. Plugged it into the 87 and turned on Samba share. From OS X, I can see the drive but cannot write to it. Checked permissions on the 87, R/W is enabled. Further investigation turned up something strange; OS X sees the drive as a NTFS formatted disk when connected to the 87. Strange!! Unplugged the HD from the 87, check on OS X, and it turns up correctly as HFS+ format. Plug it back into the 87, and OS X sees it as a NTFS drive.

I'm stumped.

I would like to keep it as a HFS+ drive if at all possible. I would like to be able to read and write to the drive while it is attached to the 87, but as it is now, I can only read.

Help pls! (A refreshing chilled mug of beer to anyone that can help me solve this! )

Thank you!

 

[RMerlin]

No idea how the Mac can come up with NTFS as the filesystem, since in this setup, the filesystem is actually SMBFS. That's why you could have, for example, a disk formatted with the Linux ext3 filesystem, and the disk would still be perfectly usable from Windows/OS X. The OS simply has no idea what filesystem a disk shared over SMB is using, and it doesn't care either.

 

[^Tripper^]

Thanks for the reply Merlin.

Strange isn't it? I would've figured, as you said, OS X wouldn't care what file system the disk would be in. I'm gonna try to reformat the drive to ext3 and see what happens.

 

[^Tripper^]

Ok, formatted the drive to ext 3 and I can read and write from OS X. Am gonna transfer my media library later (thats gonna take hours...) and report back the results. As it is, a quick test seems to work as expected. Still can't figure out why I was having that problem thou.

 

[^Tripper^]

Update. Formatted the drive to ext4 and started transferring my media library. Had about 1TB to transfer. I used the paragon drivers to format my drive to ext4, it mounted on my mac and I started the transfer. It never finished. Drive started throwing up errors all over the place. Seems like OS X does not like ext4 drives.

Anyhows, am gonna try a few more things and post updates here should anyone else have the same issue (which doesn't seem to be the case!)

Will see how it goes.

 

[BWR]

You can format it as ext4 by plugging it into the router, SSH on it and using mkfs.ext4. You can even use fdisk before mkfs to delete/add partitions to your liking. Then share the partition(s) using the router web interface and copy everything over the network.
No need to involve the Mac in partitioning and formatting.

 

[^Tripper^]

You can format it as ext4 by plugging it into the router, SSH on it and using mkfs.ext4. You can even use fdisk before mkfs to delete/add partitions to your liking. Then share the partition(s) using the router web interface and copy everything over the network.
No need to involve the Mac in partitioning and formatting.

Thanks for the info. I realised that was an option but for various reasons, I would rather keep the HD as HFS+ and do the main transfer from my Mac.

As it is now, I formatted the drive back to HFS+ and tried again. This time, OS X saw the drive as SMBFS instead of NTFS. So that problem was fixed, just how it was fixed I have no idea. I still couldn't write to the disk thou (I checked permissions on the 87 and everything was apparently the way it should be). After some more head scratching I tried something different. I remounted the HD to my Mac and created a new folder. Then I checked the properties of that folder and changed the permissions to all users read & write. Plugged it back to the 87. Didn't work. Rebooted and.... YAY!!! Finally! HD is working the way it should. I can mount, read and write from my mac as a normal shared drive.

So now I'm again transferring my media library to the drive (about 3 TB worth). I'm guessing it'll all work now based of the test I did.

So there you go folks, my personal experience with OS X, Asus 87, HFS+, seagate drive, beer, peanuts and lots of cigarettes. Fingers crossed everything works correctly after this and hopefully my post helps anyone who experiences similar issues.

Beer remains unclaimed but I'm always happy to buy a round for anyone in my neck of the woods.