Mounty for NTFS

A tiny tool to re-mount write-protected NTFS volumes under macOS in read-write mode.

Supports macOS from version 10.9 Mavericks till 14 Sonoma. Latest version: 2.4

Easy: A menu icon

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.

Light: A simple design

Mounty now acts as user interface for the free available NTFS-3G driver.

Since macOS Ventura, the build-in mechanism to re-mount in read/write mode is removed, so Mounty now uses the open-source kernel driver NTFS-3G together with macFUSE. Design is still simple, but installation is more complex.

Get: Click to install

Mounty for NTFS is available for free. You can get it here:

If you prefer Homebrew, please refer to install section.

Please note the disclaimer at the end of this page.


To support further development of Mounty, we encourage you to make a donation via Paypal:

If it's not done already, you can also support by providing a localization for Mounty: Please download the Localization Strings File, correct it, and send new version to me.

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:

example
  • status inactive - inactive - nothing to mount
  • status active - active - Volume available to re-mount
  • status working - working - Mounty is operating
  • status mounted - idle - Volume writable mounted
  • status error - error - mount failed

A bit of background

In earlier versions of macOS before Ventura, the Apple kernel driver offers a function to re-mount NTFS drives in read/write mode, but this was hidden by default, only used by Bootcamp to support Windows on Mac. Mounty has made this function available for easy access. But with the new Apple Silicon architecture, Windows is not supported anymore, and Apple has removed the write capability for NTFS-formatted drives completely.

To make Mounty work again on macOS Ventura and up, a third-party kernel driver is now needed, and the only free-available solution here is NTFS-3G. Together with the macFUSE library, Mounty is working as before, and even better.


Installation Instructions

Mounty version 1.x

Use Homebrew:

macbook:~ uwe$ brew install --cask mounty

or

Look for your version in Version History, download, activate the image, and drop the app to your applications folder.

Mounty version 2.x

The new version 2 of Mounty now acts as a graphical user interface for the third-party driver NTFS-3G. This brings the functionality back to macOS, but the installation is now a bit more complex. You need two additional pieces of software to use with Mounty 2: macFUSE and NTFS-3G for Mac.

My recommendation is to use Homebrew to do all the install work. If you are not familiar with Homebrew, please go ahead and install it as documented on their website - it is really easy! When done, you can come back here and follow-up.

Open a terminal and install Mounty with 3 commands:

macbook:~ uwe$ brew install --cask macfuse
macbook:~ uwe$ brew install gromgit/fuse/ntfs-3g-mac
macbook:~ uwe$ brew install --cask mounty

or

If you already installed macFUSE and ntfs-3g-mac you can also drag the app from already downloaded dmg image to your applications folder.

On first startup of Mounty, you probably need to accept a bunch of security-related settings:

  • You need to trust the macFUSE library in Settings -> Privacy and Security. The macFUSE is signed by "Benjamin Fleischer"
  • You need to trust the ntfs-3g driver, and probably a restart of your computer is needed.
  • Mounty will ask for disk access.

However, if you are not feeling comfortable here for any reason, 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).


Some questions that might come up

My NTFS disk disappears from Desktop when using Mounty 1.x

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.

My USB stick will not re-mount. An alert is popping up telling me to re-attach the stick, but this doesn't help.

mounty-alert

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.

Suddenly all my files disappeared - please help!

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.

Unable to re-mount in read/write mode when trying to mount Windows 10 partition

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.

Mounty will not recognize a drive or re-mount read/write even if the drive is NTFS formatted actually

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 :)


Version History

Version 2.4 - 29th of December 2023 - download

  • credits page updated

Version 2.3 - 4th of November 2023 - download

  • corrections and additions to Italian translation, thanks to Walter Ferlazzo from JAW Software
  • fixed some potential memory leaks

Version 2.2 - 23th of September 2023 - download

  • password to remount in r/w mode is now stored in keychain for your convenience
  • tested with latest macOS Sonoma, works so far :)

Version 2.1 - 25th of March 2023 - download

  • fixed a bug where Mounty was not able to mount the volume if the disk name contains spaces
  • mount command now runs on background thread

Version 2.0 - 12th of March 2023 - download

  • first Version supporting macOS Ventura
  • dependencies added: ntfs-3g-mac and macFUSE

Version 1.16 - 7th of March 2023 - download

  • still no support for macOS Ventura
  • fixed some localization issues
  • fixed a bug preventing enablement of automount option
  • added option to remove extended attributes recursively

Version 1.15 - 28th of August 2022 - download

  • added Ukrainian localization, thanks to Andriy Kupyna

Version 1.14 - 6th of June 2022 - download

  • added Catalan localization, thanks to David Lahoz
  • fixed a bug in macOS 12 where Mounty is left in inconsistent state when re-mount fails due to NTFS filesystem marked as "dirty" and needs cleanup by chkdsk on Windows
  • Mounty is still operating with NSTask workaround on macOS 12, at least there was an update on my bug report that it might be fixed in future OS update
  • if you are running macOS Big Sur or earlier there is no need to update to current version

Version 1.13 - 20th of December 2021 - download

  • added compatibility with macOS 12 "Monterey"
  • Apple has changed the entire mount process in Monterey from the previous kernel based architecture toward one that runs primarily in user space
  • now the "mount_lifs" command is triggering the mount but custom flags like "read/write" are now ignored which leads into a mount failure
  • I have filed a bug report to Apple, hope that this will be solved sooner or later
  • as a workaround, I have switched to NSTask API but now you need to input credentials for elevating privileges, sorry for inconvenience. Also, the mount point has changed from system mount point "/Volumes" to a user-owned hidden mount point in user's home directory "~/.mounty" for that reason
  • once Apple will provide a fix, I will switch back to DiskArbitration framework
  • if you are running macOS Big Sur or earlier there is no need to update to current version

Version 1.12 - 6th of February 2021 - download

  • when macOS appearance switched between light and dark, the status icon was not updated accordingly, this is fixed now
  • the dark appearance icons are dimmed a bit now
  • added tolerance to volume kind label if its not exactly written as "ntfs" but contains the "ntfs" string

Version 1.11 - 24th of Jan 2021 - download

  • new icons for dark appearance
  • compiled as universal binary including both x86_64 and arm64 architectures to run natively on Intel and Apple Silicon
  • notifications were not thrown because the authorisation request was missing, this is fixed now

Version 1.10 - 29th of Nov 2020 - download

  • this version is only compatible with macOS 11 Big Sur and up
  • remove deprecations: update of notification framework
  • added disclaimer on first startup

Version 1.9 - 21th of Sep 2018 - download

  • last version compatible with macOS Catalina and earlier
  • bug fix for crash when Volume does not contain UUID (e.g. MBR Disk)
  • Note: Old devices which does not contain UUID cannot be tracked for auto-mount
  • Russian Credits Page added (again, thanks to Anton)

Version 1.8 - 12th of Sep 2018 - download

  • Added Russian Localization (thanks to Anton)
  • Added feature to automount volumes (without the notification)
  • fixed equal volume name bug

Version 1.7 - 4th of Nov 2017 - download

  • Localizations updates ane new ones:
  • - Portuguese (thanks to Carlos)
    - Chinese corrections, thanks to Barry
    - new Chinese Traditional, thanks to Barry
    - Brazilian (thanks to Bruno)
    - Spanish (thanks to Daniel)
    - Korean (thanks to Kim Jinbong)
  • As far as I have tested, this version runs perfectly on Mac OS High Sierra.

Version 1.6 - 2th of June 2017 - download

  • Localizations Updates:
  • Thanks to the community, bunch of corrections were made to improve the Google translations of
    - Chinese (thanks to Gerald and Yang)
    - Italian (thanks to Emanuelle and Helmo)
    - French (thanks to Dominique)
    - new: Dutch (thanks to Ferdi)

Version 1.5 - 26th of May 2017 - download

  • Localizations (incomplete and made by Google. If you want to contribute, please download the Localization Strings File, correct it, and send new version to me).

Version 1.4 - 25th of May 2017 - download

  • Compatibility update to fix an issue with macOS 10.12.5
  • Added new status: Mounts is operating: The re-mount of larger volumes can take a while. When mounts is working you cannot accidentally issue another action anymore.

Version 1.3 - 29th of January 2017 - download

  • Smaller tray icon
  • Fixed some possible memory leaks
  • Added modal alert when drive has spaces in names: I am using DADiskMountWithArguments API from Disk Arbitration framework and when there are spaces in volume name the remount action will fail with unknown error. If you have an idea how to solve it, please let me know.

Version 1.2 - 9th of November 2015 - download

  • Fixed a problem where volumes appears as not re-mountable by mistake intermittently.

Version 1.1 - 27th of July 2014 - download

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.


comments powered by Disqus