Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software grants you with access to write, copy, edit, move or delete files on Microsoft NTFS-formatted drives from your Mac. Mount, unmount, verify, format or set any of Microsoft NTFS volumes as a startup drive. Mount in Read-Only if you need to access sensitive data without modifying.
Unfortunately this is by design.
Mounty is using the Apple kernel driver. It allows read/write mount of NTFS drives only with the 'nobrowse' option. The mount point becomes hidden and disappears from Desktop and Finder menu. To make it easier to re-locate the drive I have added the 'Show in Finder' option in Mounty menu.
This can happen when the USB stick is not cleanly unmounted from the Windows PC. If you simply unplug the USB stick from PC without using the little tray icon to detach the hardware correctly, the volume will be marked as 'not cleanly unmounted'. There might be some dirty sectors left and Mac OS X will not be able to re-mount in read-write mode for that reason.
This is usually happen when not all files are written properly due to an unmount operation not finishing. The NTFS partition might be marked as 'dirty' and the Apple NTFS driver cannot recover from that situation. Mounty will not delete anything by itself, please try to restore your files on a Windows PC using usual recovery s/w, i.e. chkdsk command line utility or professional tools like GetDataBack for Windows. If you do not own any Windows you can use tools for macOS that can deal with NTFS partition maintenance, like Paraogn Harddisk Manager or Tuxera Disk Manager.
This is because the file has extended attributes, refer to the Manpage of xattr for further explanation. If you open the file path in terminal application, you can list the attributes with ls -l@ <filename>
, and remove those attributes with xattr -d com-apple.<attribute> <filename>, i.e.: xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo testfile.txt
If you try to mount a Windows System partition, Mounty might fail when Hibernation feature is enabled. There is a Fast Start feature in Windows which might be enabled by default, and this is causing the drive to be locked. Within Windows running, you need to run the command powercfg /hibernate off
in an admin powershell and restart Windows to disable this feature and remove the lock to enable it for Mounty. Thanks to Art Schultz pointing that out.
We have seen that certain third-party NTFS tools will re-name the volume kind property of an NTFS drive to something other than 'ntfs'. In this case it might happen that the macOS kernel driver ist not able to re-mount in read/write mode anymore. Thanks to Giovanni for his patience to reveal this issue during a remote debug session :)
Both tools are available for free download: https://www.paragon-software.com/paragon-mojave-tools-preview/#overview
NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software Mojave Preview edition is a high-performance tool that enables you to write, copy, edit, move or delete files on Microsoft NTFS-formatted drives from your Mac. The tool is fully compatible with Mojave Preview and is available for free download: https://www.paragon-software.com/paragon-mojave-tools-preview/#ntfs-for-mac
Key features:
APFS for Windows by Paragon SoftwarePreviewedition — a driver which enables Windows users to access Apple File System (APFS) volumes on PCs, now with full support on Fusion Drives in macOS Mojave Preview. The revamped APFS for Windows comes with support for encrypted volumes and APFS Containers composed of multiple partitions. Free download: https://www.paragon-software.com/paragon-mojave-tools-preview/#apfs-for-windows
Key features: