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Read and Write NTFS Volumes On The Mac

Posted in Apple, Downloadable, Geeky by Dan at 10:02 am

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Ever since Apple released Boot Camp, Mac users who partitioned more then 32GB to their Windows partition have been unable to write to the little Windows drive sitting on their Mac desktop.

Those days are over thanks to a open source Google (gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!) project called MacFuse. MacFUSE is a port of Linux’s FUSE kernel-level interface to just for Mac OS X. Even though it is not yet an easy install, if you need to write to your Windows partition from your Mac this will be a HUGE help.

You will first need to download and install MacFUSE via the compiled DMG.

Then you will need to download and install the precompiled NTFS-3g package.

Once that is done open Disk Utility and find the device identifier of the NTFS volume, and unmount it (Usually called disk0s2 or something along those lines). Once that is down open Terminal and type:

mkdir /Volumes/DEVICEID Except type in your device ID that you found earlier.

Then type ntfs-3g /dev/disk0s2 /Volumes/DEVICEID -o
ping_diskarb,volname=”DEVICEID”

Then the finder should mount your NTFS volume. This mount procedure must be repeated every time you want to mount an NTFS volume, and I suggest you might want to create an automator script to ease the process. Use with caution.

6 Comments, Comment or Trackback

  1. Olivier

    How about Google spends 5 more minutes and makes this work with a nice GUI?

    Jun 18th, 2007

  2. Steven

    Or just install MacFusion

    also take this with a grain of salt…been using fuse for a long time, but i still don’t trust the ntfs driver. right now i’m moving my 1.2TB NAS (5 drives) onto 2 750GB external esata/usb drives to be shared between mac/windows/linux…and as dangerous as fat32 is, I still went with that over ntfs.

    PS - you can format drives as fat32 > 32GB, just use mac or linux to do it. i’m sure there’s windows utilities to do so, too.

    Jun 18th, 2007

  3. Olivier

    Steven,
    Fat 32 is all nice until you want to get long filenames or permissions or files bigger than 4GB (DVD isos clock in really quickly to that level),
    A cheap ass NSLU-2 would liaise your USB drives with your network.
    For just a little more, you could just buy a used Mac Mini G4 and get some 1-Click AFP or SMB drive sharing.Fat 32 is a safe choice, but not a choice for future needs.

    Jun 19th, 2007

  4. wdarkk

    When I followed the steps as above, I can no longer access the disk with Startup Disk to restart into windows. Help!

    Jun 20th, 2007

  5. robert

    they have updated the software to be an easy to install package now - you should fix your post so people don’t waste their time using the terminal.

    Jun 20th, 2007

  6. rookie

    I am a complete rookie. I bought a mac to see why the “experts” I know, told me a mac is better than a pc.

    I later bought an external hard drive - 400GB.
    at work I have a pc running win xp. - I had to format the hard-drive in order to make the pc recognise the full size of the drive -so it´s now an NTFS partition.

    From experience with another 80GB hard drive I haven´t been able to write on with the mac I suspect the same will happen with the 400GB drive.

    Bearing in mind that I have no idea about linux or any other non-windows operating system, can anyone tell me if there is one nice, tidy, simple application I can install on my mac so that I can write back up my garageband stuff on the 400 GB drive?
    thanx in advance

    Jul 18th, 2007

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