A tiny tool to re-mount write-protected NTFS volumes under macOS in read-write mode.
Supports macOS from version 10.9 Mavericks till 12 Monterey. Latest version: 1.15 macOS 13 Ventura is not supported currently, please refer to explanation in Detail Section below.
Start the program and see it in action:
You will be notified if there is any volume connected to the computer which is NTFS formatted and ready to re-mount in read-write mode.
Mounty for NTFS comes without any decorations.
No additional driver will be installed. It simply makes use of the build-in mechanisms already provided by macOS - no strings attached.
If you prefer Homebrew , you'll probably know what to do: brew install --cask mounty
From the icon in menu bar you can always bring a finder window to front to manage the contents of the mounted drive.
The colour of menu icon reports the current state:
- inactive - nothing to mount
- active - Volume available to re-mount
- working - Mounty is operating
- idle - Volume writable mounted
- error - mount failed
Occasionally I need to share files with my colleagues via USB sticks. Since we are working on different platforms the sticks might be NTFS-formatted. No problem so far, there are several resources out to the web describing to accomplish this task, e.g.
I personally have chosen the more pragmatic way, just open a terminal and issue some mount commands like:
macbook:~ uwe$ sudo umount /Volumes/UNTITLED
macbook:~ uwe$ sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,auto,nobrowse /dev/disk3s1 ~/ntfs-volume
However, tired of typing this over and over, I have written Mounty to accomplish exactly this - but in a much more convenient fashion. So, under the hood, it happens an unmount and a remount short after, followed by opening a Finder window pointing to the hidden mount point.
Apple has changed the entire mount process from the previous kernel based architecture toward one that runs in user space. The ability to mount NTFS file systems in read/write mode was never a supported end-user function, and was only implemented in NTFS kext to support the BootCamp install process. This is now obsolete in Ventura and deactivated in the UserFS NTFS plugin. And sadly Mounty will not work anymore.
I am currently working on a new version of Mounty, utilizing NTFS-3G and macFUSE, where Mounty acts as a graphical interface, bringing back the functionality on macOS Ventura, but this will take some more time. If you can't wait any longer, or if you do not want to install macFUSE and NTFS-3G, I can recommend a new player in the game: iBoysoft NTFS for Mac. You can download it using this link. It is offering similar interface like Mounty, and lot more, but it's a commercial product you have to pay for (after evaluation period).
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 :)
The Appstore Sandbox restrictions does not allow sandboxed apps to re-mount external volumes. We have rejected Mounty from Mac Appstore for that reason and decided to distribute it for free, without Sandbox capability.
Mounty uses Apple's Notification Center to issue notification whenever a NTFS volume to re-mount is detected. If you want to re-mount a volume from a notification please change the alert style to "Alert" for Mounty from Notification Center Settings in System Settings application.