Friday, November 29, 2013

How to make MAC write on NTFS drive

By default Mac OS can only read NTFS, it cannot write to it.
Follow these steps to write on your NTFS disk(tested with MAC 10.8.5).
1. open Terminal
2. ls /Volumes/
    you can see all available Disks name.
3. Now I assume your external hard-disk name is "Mantosh Harddisk".
    diskutil info /Volumes/Mantosh Harddisk
     Now you must be seeing all the info related with your disk.
4. sudo vi /etc/fstab
    This is a system file, that's why you need to use sudo.
5. write the below line in this file.
    LABEL=Mantosh\040Harddisk none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse 
    \040 is for space in hard-disk name.
    (if LABEL is not supported in your system, you can use UUID=NUMBER none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse)
6. Quit Terminal and Now, just unmount and re-mount the disk.

Wait a minute, I don’t see my disk listed in the Finder window!
As of Mountain Lion, the “nobrowse” mount option is required for this to work. This means that the partition will not show up on your desktop. However, you can access it normally through Finder by doing the following:
  • Open Terminal and type “open /Volumes/THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_VOLUME” (without the quotes)
  • The Finder pops up automatically and you can see your disk listed there.

OR simply format your hard-disk to FAT file system.

13 comments:

  1. Man, this really rocks :*

    One of the best/easiest solutions ever ^_^

    ReplyDelete
  2. PERFECT and no additional S/W solution! LOVE IT!
    Thanks a bunch!

    ReplyDelete
  3. How do you undo this?? it dit not work, my ntfs drive still cant be written to but the drive IS gone from finder...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. To undo – undo whatever changes you have made in "/etc/fstab" file. (sudo vi /etc/fstab)

      Possible reason for not working - your device might not be supporting unique device name feature. You should use step 2 and 3 to analyze and find the unique ID of your device and use that in LABEL. May be Device ID would click. I had also faced the same problem and used Device ID instead of Device Name.

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  4. Can you please elaborate steps please?

    ReplyDelete
  5. This steps work on maverick 10.9.2???

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. u can test and leave a comment

      Delete
    2. I tried that on Mavericks and I cannot mount it. It says "The file /Volumes/Elements does not exist." Also in Disk utility mount don't work. When I edit something in fstab it shows, but it is not writeable. It does the same thing with both LABEL and UUID. I didn't tried restart though.
      And I should also mention, that I have not much experience in this stuff so maybe theres something I missed.

      Delete
  6. this really worked...thanks a bunch..i just did it fr one of my harddisks...but somehow now it can write into all my other harddisks too...thanks a bunch..

    ReplyDelete
  7. works like a charm on 10.9.4
    thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Oh, I forgot, I have OS 10.9.4...

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi Mantosh,
    I too have an Iomega 500mg drive that is 75% full with data backed up from a Windows pc. I have a Mac Pro now and wanted to use the drive to save data but can't write to it. I tried your suggested commands and I think the commands might have worked but they didn't change my privilege to write on the disk. The next few times that I tried using the commands, i got "none not found" as none was the first word in the command. I removed it to see what happens and the Terminal gave me "NTFS not found" as error as that was the next word in the command.
    How can i access the system file and delete the commands and start over to see. The NUM command with UUID didn't work either...
    Please advise

    ReplyDelete