For years now, Apple has provided support for Microsoft's major drive formats—namely, FAT and NTFS. With full read and write support for FAT32, everything works well. Until NTFS support is required. Apple's native NTFS driver handles read capability, yet write support has long been absent from the equation. Even though write support is built in to the native driver itself, it's disabled by default in OS X, since Apple doesn't officially support writing data to NTFS drives. Though Apple supports, an alternative format also created by Microsoft to read/write OS X and Windows, the fact remains that Windows drives are formatted with NTFS by default. This fact makes it very likely that you'll need to write data to an NTFS-formatted drive from a Mac at some point or another.
With this in mind, let's proceed. • On your Apple computer, connect an NFTS-formatted drive to an external port. Take note of the volume name, as you'll need it later. • Launch Terminal.app and type in the following command, entering the admin password when prompted ( Figure A). Sudo nano /etc/fstab Figure A • This will open the fstab file that is blank by default. Now, using the volume name, enter the following command ( Figure B).
LABEL=VOLUME_NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse Figure B • Press [Ctrl]+[O] to write the information to file, then press Enter to save the change ( Figure C). Figure C • Repeat steps 2-3 for each drive you wish to enable NTFS write support on, and then press [Ctrl]+[X] to close the file ( Figure D). Figure D • Next, eject the drive(s) and mount them again. This time, you'll notice the drive does not appear in the Finder.
Select Go Go to Folder. From the Finder menu, enter /Volumes, then press Enter to view the hidden volumes connected to your Mac. From here, you'll be able to drag and drop the volume(s) to the sidebar for easy access when reading and writing to/from, as it does not mount on the desktop unfortunately.
To undo the edits made to the etc/fstab file, simply load the file (as in step 2) and delete the entries created for each drive, then save and exit. While this is quick and easy to implement, it's not without drawbacks, such as occasional instability, the fact that it's unsupported, and you can only enable it on a per-drive basis. If you manage multiple drives, need this to work quickly and efficiently, or if you're deploying this as a solution to multiple end users, then a more robust driver like those provided by 3rd-party developers (such as FUSE or Tuxera) might be a better solution for production or mission-critical needs. Also see • • • •. Youtube my passport file fomatiing for mac os.
This question already has an answer here: • 13 answers I recently purchased a MacBook Air. I have an external 3TB Hard Drive that I would like to use, however, I have used this drive to backup files from my desktop (Windows) computer and the drive is setup with NTFS format, thus I can read files from the hard drive but I cannot write files to the hard drive. I read that I could install NTFS drivers in Mac OSX allowing me to write to the hard drive. • Is this true? • Are there reasons I should not do this? • If there is no drawbacks to not doing this what are the best drivers to install and where do I find them?
Mac OS X has always been able to read NTFS drives, but tucked away in Mac OS X is a hidden option to enable write support to drives formatted as NTFS (NTFS stands for New Technology File System and is a proprietary file system format for Microsoft Windows).
I ask this because being new to Mac and OSX I want to ensure I do not want to risk messing up my hard drive. Yes, you can install software that lets you read/write to NTFS partitions. There is both free and paid software, and I recommend installing ntfs-3g with. Ruby -e '$(curl -fsSL brew install fuse4x && brew install ntfs-3g sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig sudo ln -s /usr/local/sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs Run brew info fuse4x-kext and you should be given two lines based on your version that you need to run. Run these lines in Terminal, then eject and remount the disk. Enable ntfs write support in Mavericks You can enable for ntfs in Mavericks.