Curious… been doing bootcamp since win7 (dual boot 2010 cMP). I KNOW there was a time when I could actually mount my Mac formatted drives (HFS+) when I was in windows, but I seem to not be able to do that any more. Don’t know if that was specific to win7.
So I would like to know of ways I can move files back and forth between each side. I am aware there is some paid software from Paragon that allows NTFS drives to be mounted under MacOS. OTOH I have read this is dangerous because it may cause file corruption of booting issues from my win10 side. What options do I have?
I can’t help you with BootCamp, since I don’t use it, but…
Do you need to write to those NTFS volumes as well? macOS includes read-only NTFS support. Maybe that’s good enough?
If you’re concerned and don’t want to take chances with third-party software, another approach is to create a third disk partition formatted as FAT or exFAT. Both Windows and macOS have excellent support for these file systems, so you can use it for files that are to be shared between the systems or as temporary storage while moving files between the systems.
Another option is to forgo BootCamp and boot Windows into a virtual machine using your favorite VM software (VirtualBox, VMWare or Parallels). All three should provide support for shared folders, where a designated folder on the Mac host is accessible from the Windows guest operating system.
I use VirtualBox and shared folders all the time for my Linux guests and have rarely encountered problems with it.
Point is I want to write to that NTFS volume! BUT that’s a great suggestion, I have a disk that has tons of free space. It’s got my clean, pristine HS OS on it (plus some disk tools).
Disk Utility is making me nervous as it seems stuck in a “Shrinking file system” step… seems to be going for a very long time now…
Depending on what disk blocks are being used, this might take a long time.
In order to shrink a partition, you first need to make sure the blocks at the end (the ones that will no longer be a part of it) don’t contain any files’ data. So if there are files using that region, their data needs to be moved to other blocks before the partition can be shrunk. It really doesn’t matter how much free space there is in the partition, only whether files are using the blocks that are about to be removed from it.
Depending on the number of files that need to be relocated and the amount that you’re reducing the partition size, this might take a long time - maybe on the order of hours.
Yes I understand that, just figured with only 300G or so on a 1T drive, shouldn’t be too many files to move around. After an hour or two it finished. Maybe next time I do a defragment (hmmm, do we even have any utilities to do that these days… there used to be several to choose from?).