Last Updated: October 01, 2020
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14.76K
· _jeffreyjackson

NTFS Read / Write in OS X

Mountain Lion has native read / write support, but it is not enabled by default.

Start off by editing your fstab like in any other linux/unix environment.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Then add the following line to enable read/write permissions on your NTFS partition. Replace VOLUME_NAME with the name of your volume. You can find this in disk utility if you don't know it.

LABEL=VOLUME_NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse

Save by "control-x" to exit then "y" to save if you are not familiar with nano.

If you have a space in your VOLUME_NAME, you can escape it with \040.

You will need nobrowse parameter in order for this to work. This is so that it doesn't show up as a mounted drive on your desktop. Once you have edited your fstab, either reboot or unmount/remount the partition in disk utility. I would suggest reboot however.

In Finder, navigate all the way to the top with:

Shift Command C

or in terminal:

cd /Volumes/

You should see your read/writable NTFS partition.

If you need quick access to the drive, create a symlink on your desktop:

ln -s /Volumes/VOLUME_NAME ~/Desktop/VOLUME_NAME  

Enjoy!

3 Responses
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Drive mounted by this solution don't display in devices list in Finder sidebar. Do you solve this?

over 1 year ago ·

that's one of the tradeoffs. to get it to work you have to use nobrowse which means it won't show up in Finder. Please see the last line of the pro tip, you'll need to create an alias.

over 1 year ago ·

How can I change these settings to default. I begin using a software, but these changes don't let it to maunt my drive. (Or I think so)

over 1 year ago ·