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How to Write to NTFS External Disk Drives from OS X 10.11 El Capitan

October 13, 2015 84 Comments

By default you can’t write to Windows NTFS hard disk and USB drives as they appear as read only on OS X 10.11 users desktops.

windows-write-ntfs-disksYou 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 10.11 El Capitan.  OSX10.9 & OSX 10.8 guide here.

 

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:

Disable SIP

You need to disable the new System Integrity Protection to install into some system protected directories – this involves booting your OSX into Recovery Mode with ‘command’ + ‘r’ on restart and disabling with….

csrutil disable

More info on doing that here.

Install osxfuse – either via Homebrew or download latest pre-release from Github

brew install Caskroom/cask/osxfuse

Or via Github using the dmg of the latest pre-release, this won’t be currently distributed via Homebrew as it is pre-release, but it fixes the numbered suffix issue that was appearing in drive names, makes it easier to mount and unmount NTFS drives. When installing make sure to select the “MacFUSE Compatibility Layer”.

Install ntfs-3g

brew install homebrew/fuse/ntfs-3g

Link to new mount_ntfs file

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

sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig

Link to the new

sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/ntfs-3g/2015.3.14/sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs

Re-Attach/Mount Your NTFS Drive

 

read-write-ntfs-disk

Thats it, check your Desktop,  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.

If you can’t see the drive, launch Disk Utility from Applications/Utilities and right click the drive and select Show in Finder

windows-ntfs-show-in-finder

Thanks to Vihang Patil

 

 

Cats: macOS Tags: ntfs

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