By default you can’t write to Windows NTFS hard disk and USB drives as they appear as read only on the Desktop’s of OS X 10.9 users workstations – which is a bit of a pain in the ass!

If you only use a drive on OS X then it should be formatted as Mac OS X Extended, Journaled. If you need to move data between OS X and Windows then FAT32 is the best bet. If you need a robust, flexible drive on Windows then use NTFS. Follow the directions on the OS X Fuse website to download and configure the software. Follow the instructions to download NTFS-3G for Mac OS X, whose development seems stopped right now but still works in Yosemite. Once OS X Fuse and NTFS-3G are installed, your Mac should be able to read and write to NTFS disks just fine. Enable NTFS write support in Terminal. If reformatting your NTFS drive for Mac is not an option, you can enable write support for specific Windows disks using macOS Terminal.

Apple’s macOS can read from Windows-formatted NTFS drives, but can’t write to them out of the box. Here are a few solutions for getting full read/write access to NTFS drives. This could be useful if you want to write to a Boot Camp partition on your Mac, as Windows system partitions must use the NTFS file system.

You can write to these disks with a few installs and tweaks in the Terminal, which will make all NTFS drives writeable – there are also some commercial point and click apps that can get the job done if you don’t fancy wading into the Terminal.

This has been tested in OSX 10.9.2 Mavericks. OSX 10.8 guide here. OSX 10.11 here.

This guide is updated April 2014, the previous package used; fuse4x, is no longer required as osxfuse will work without it. Also the package ntfs-3g is updated and you have to sym link the mount_ntfs file to the ntfs-3g one, so if you have set up before and have updated your brew you need to remove fuse4x. This is all taken into consideration below.

Also on completion when a ntfs disk is mounted a new error maybe displayed but the NTFS disk still mounts and is read/writable.

If you previously had this working it may well be faster to remove all brew related packages and start again.

Get Xcode and Brewed Up

To start with you are going to need Xcode and some Unix style application packages – and what makes this easy on OSX is Homebrew, a package manager for OSX, follow this guide if you haven’t already got it, it will get you up to speed on both Xcode and Homebrew first, after that come back here and tackle the rest below which involves installing a couple of apps and tweaking a couple of files.

Once you have Xcode and Homebrew the following will allow you to write to NTFS disks. Launch Terminal:

Optional – Remove Previous installs of fuse4x

Install ntfs-3g

At this point you need to change the mount_ntfs file, the new file will allow the writes to NTFS disks, these commands will back up the original and then link to the modified mount_ntfs file as supplied by Brew/ntfs-3g

Back up the original

Link to the new

Install osxfuse

Install osxfuse kernel instructions

To see the commands required use the command below or simply run the 2 commands below the screen grab. Datamax e class printer driver for mac.

If you already have an older version of fuse4x you’ll need to also to run the other commands listed before installing this version.

Follow the 2 commands as highlighted

Re-Attach/Mount Your NTFS Drive

You will get this warning but the disk will still load

Thats it, now all mounted NTFS drives can be written to, if it doesn’t work just disconnect/connect the NTFS drive. Some users end up with a numbered suffix like UNTITLED 2, it still works fine, however I am not aware of a fix for that.

Original mount_ntfs file here.

Some questions that might come up

My NTFS disk diapppears for Desktop when using Mounty

Unfortunately this is by design.
Mounty is using the Apple kernel driver. It allows read/write mount of NTFS drives only with the 'nobrowse' option. The mount point becomes hidden and disappears from Desktop and Finder menu. To make it easier to re-locate the drive I have added the 'Show in Finder' option in Mounty menu.

My USB stick will not re-mount. An alert is popping up telling me to re-attach the stick, but this doesn't help.

This can happen when the USB stick is not cleanly unmounted from the Windows PC. If you simply unplug the USB stick from PC without using the little tray icon to detach the hardware correctly, the volume will be marked as 'not cleanly unmounted'. There might be some dirty sectors left and Mac OS X will not be able to re-mount in read-write mode for that reason.

Suddenly all my files disappeared - please help!

This is usually happen when not all files are written properly due to an unmount operation not finishing. The NTFS partition might be marked as 'dirty' and the Apple NTFS driver cannot recover from that situation. Mounty will not delete anything by itself, please try to restore your files on a Windows PC using usual recovery s/w, i.e. chkdsk command line utility or professional tools like GetDataBack for Windows. If you do not own any Windows you can use tools for macOS that can deal with NTFS partition maintenance, like Paraogn Harddisk Manager or Tuxera Disk Manager.

Sometimes the files are grayed out and cannot be modified anymore.

Mac Os X Yosemite Write To Ntfs External Drive Fat32

This is because the file has extended attributes, refer to the Manpage of xattr for further explanation. If you open the file path in terminal application, you can list the attributes with ls -l@ <filename>, and remove those attributes with xattr -d com-apple.<attribute> <filename>, i.e.: xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo testfile.txt

Osx Write To Ntfs External Drive

Unable to re-mount in read/write mode when trying to mount Windows 10 partition

Mac Os X Yosemite Write To Ntfs External Drive Usb

If you try to mount a Windows System partition, Mounty might fail when Hibernation feature is enabled. There is a Fast Start feature in Windows which might be enabled by default, and this is causing the drive to be locked. Within Windows running, you need to run the command powercfg /hibernate off in an admin powershell and restart Windows to disable this feature and remove the lock to enable it for Mounty. Thanks to Art Schultz pointing that out.