NTFS write on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Finally I moved from Windows XP to a Macbook Pro which I've planed for a long time. I was trying to copy some files to a NTFS drive and found myself looking at this:

quickly I discover under MacOS, NTFS drives are read-only. I did some search on how to make NTFS writable and found NTFS-3g, a full NTFS driver that can be installed to make NTFS drive fully read/write. Then I ran into this comment thread in the NTFS-3g support forum, it says:

On SnowLeopard you can always use the built-in kernel NTFS driver (which I wrote btw. :)) instead of NTFS-3g... To make read-write the default for a volume simply create a file /etc/fstab and put a line like the following for each NTFS volume: LABEL=mylabel none ntfs rw Where "mylabel" is the label of the NTFS volume (the name under the icon of the NTFS volume on your desktop). Alternatively you can use UUID=myuuid instead of LABEL=mylabel in which case myuuid is obtained by running: echo `sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs.fs/ntfs.util -k disk0s4` That assumes disk0s4 is the NTFS volume containing device so you need to change that accordingly to match your device. To find out on which device an NTFS volume is mounted at present run "mount". Best regards, Anton

This is very good, I thought: Snow Leopard already got NTFS write built-in. However later on in that thread, some one warns of corrupt file system, I want to take the chance and see if this work.

Since my drive label is "FreeAgent Drive" with a space in it and the instruction did not show how to specify label with space, I went with the UUID route. The /etc/fstab file does not exist on my machine so I created one with just one line:

UUID=a1cda84e-5f6a-4a51-b6cb-0c1c78f2da05 none ntfs rw

with this in place, I eject the NTFS drive and plug in back in and voilà, the drive is now writable. Everything appears to work...appears. In reality it doesn't work! I tried to copy some files, the Finder goes through the motion of copying but in the end, it puts up this error:

I can copy the same file to another drive both mac and fat32. But not on the ntfs drive.

Another problem is the drive won't eject. So I try shutting down and it never finish. It just keep spinning. So I hold down the power switch to kill it.

After reboot, I reconnect the ntfs drive and the file directories that was copied are not there anymore. Now copying file gets that same error dialog. But eject works and shutdown works.

All this for naught and I guess that's why Apple didn't enable ntfs write.