We only allow read/write mounts if the "nobrowse" option was also Michael Dreher points out in the comments of the preceding link: There are some excellent instructions on.
How to copy files to read-only NTFS hard drive on a Mac? A.
There is SL-NTFS, which isn't maintained anymore, but promises to enable NTFS write support on Snow Leopard (10.6).īecause SL-NTFS is basically an interface for configuring the Apple NTFS driver, any issues you might encounter will be related to the Apple driver rather than SL-NTFS. These are not free, but offer support and promise better speed/stability. You will have a new option in System Preferences that enables you to write to NTFS drives.
Download the latest version from here and install it. Then, download NTFS-3G, a free NTFS driver. This is a free version (there's also a paid one, and the free one's a bit harder to find).įirst, download and install Fuse for OS X and select the MACFUSE compaibility layer during the install. Those are a couple of commands you need to run through your terminal. Homebrew will tell you how to replace the default OS X automounter so external NTFS drives are mounted using the new driver. Then, follow the instructions on the screen. If you have Homebrew, installing NTFS support is as easy as running the following in a terminal: brew install ntfs-3g This is of course not a solution for files larger than 4GiB.
Re-format the drive to FAT-32, which both Windows and OS X can read and write out of the box.
This is the obvious answer to those who don't want to install software that potentially could harm their data (which is always the case with hacks / unstable software). OS X can't write NTFS out of the box (at least not without some tweaks). Once inside OS X's hidden Volumes folder, you can drag your NTFS drive to the sidebar underneath the Favorites tab in the sidebar for easy access.The problem is that your drive is NTFS formatted. Type / volumes as the path and press Enter. Within Finder's menubar, click Go and then Go to Folder. You'll notice that the drive no longer shows up in Finder's Devices menu or on the desktop. This is due to it's precarious existence as a hidden feature. Luckily, there's a pretty simple workaround for this. When the drive has been unmounted, unplug it from the Mac and then plug it back in. With the hard work of editing system configuration files out of the way, navigate to Finder and unmount the drive. Make sure to replace drivename with the name of the drive. The drive's name should contain no spaces, as adding a space to the configuration file would tell your Mac to interpret whatever's after that space as a separate command.įinally, press Control-O to save the file and Control-X to exit nano. LABEL= drivename none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse It's a system configuration file that's responsible for the drives and partitions connected to the Mac. The file that you'll edit is called stab. The program is called nano and it's the text editor that's built into Terminal. When you're finished typing your password, you'll be brought to a program that looks like something out of the 80's. If you've never used Terminal before, it might come as a surprise that when entering a password, rather than showing what you're typing Terminal will show nothing at all. That means you're going to need to enter the administrator password and press Enter. The sudo command is telling Terminal that you'd like to be granted administrator access to the command line. For whatever reason, though, it's an option that Apple has chosen to hide from the sight of the average user. What this means for you is that in order to enable writing to an NTFS drive, you're going to need to dive into Terminal which is located within the Utilities folder. Writing to NTFS drives is a functionality that's been built into OS X for some time. How to Write to NTFS Drives in OS X Mavericks