Look in Finder to see the name of the drive.Plug in the drive and let Mac OS X mount it read-only.Here are the steps to mount an NTFS drive read/write from the command line: But mount_ntfs won’t create this mount point, so we have to do it. For example, the GoFlex drive I bought yesterday mounts as “/Volumes/FreeAgent GoFlex Drive” by default. There’s just one problem: Where should we connect the NTFS file system? Mac OS X automatically creates a new directory (called a “mount point” in UNIX-speak) in /Volumes with the name of the filesystem. Although OS X always tells mount_ntfs to mount NTFS drives read-only, we can tell it to enable writing as well by using the “-o rw” flag. When presented an NTFS drive, Mac OS X calls a utility called mount_ntfs that resides in the /sbin directory, and we can call it, too. This simple command-line utility takes a few arguments and attaches a raw disk device to a point in the unified filesystem tree. Plug in a drive, and Mac OS X makes it available for you using a layer cake of commands, but the bottom-most command is “mount”. Making disks available is called “mounting” in UNIX geek-speak, and mount commands in modern operating systems are like ogres: They have many layers. Users have reported kernel panics when using these methods, and although I have not heard of data corruption, it is possible as well. It is possible and even simple) to enable read/write support with the native Snow Leopard drivers, but this is definitely an “at your own risk” proposition. Although early betas enabled read/write support by default, it was limited once again to read-only in the final releases. Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” adds a third alternative: Native read/write support for NTFS. The open source NTFS-3G driver has also been ported to Mac OS X, allowing read/write support for free.Although available for purchase separately, many hard disk drives like the Seagate GoFlex now include a free copy of Paragon NTFS. Paragon Software’s NTFS for Mac OS X is a full and supported read/write solution.As mentioned, all versions of Mac OS X since 10.3 “Panther” have included read-only NTFS support, but those wanting full access had two options: This leads to issues for Mac users, especially when they dual-boot with Boot Camp or buy external hard disk drives. Therefore, most PC hard disk drives, including external USB drives, now come formatted with NTFS by default. Windows XP allowed either FAT32 or NTFS for booting Windows Vista could be forced to boot from FAT32 Windows 7 requires NTFS. Much of this credit goes to Windows NT architect Dave Cutler, who also led development of DEC VMS, the RISC concepts that became Alpha, and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.Īlthough every version of Windows supports evolutions of the old FAT filesystem, modern iterations increasingly require NTFS. Microsoft may be fairly criticized for producing expensive, proprietary systems, but they have dome some amazing things with disks, and NTFS is arguably one of the most advanced filesystems in wide usage. Borrowing from OS/2’s HPFS and VMS’ Files-11, NTFS is a journalling filesystem with many features, including POSIX links, alternate data streams, sparse files, compression, and encryption.Īlthough just about everything Microsoft produces is maligned by UNIX and Mac geeks, this hatred is unwarranted in the case of the many storage advances coming out of Redmond. Microsoft introduced the advanced NTFS filesystem with their Windows NT operating system in 1993. The common FAT filesystem, supported by just about every operating system, is just too basic for modern operating systems. In this post, I’ll discuss methods for activating this native NTFS write support, as well as the pros and cons of doing so! Introducing NTFSĪ filesystem is the basic scheme for organizing data on a hard disk drive. Although 10.6 “Snow Leopard” includes NTFS write support, it is disabled by default. Third-party software like Paragon’s NTFS or the free NTFS-3G driver enabled read/write support, but a native solution was more desirable. Individual files often require conversion, but what about whole disks? Apple has long supported the universal and simplistic FAT filesystem, and added read-only support for NTFS back in 2003 in OS X 10.3 “Panther”. One of the daily hassles of using Apple Macintosh computers is the incompatibilities that arise with the broad Microsoft Windows world.
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