Writing to NTFS volume from MacOS X (this is NOT a question thread!)

[AHunter3]

I just successfully drag-copied a file into the window of an NTFS volume that’s hooked as an external firewire disk to my PowerBook G4. In case that last particle of information didn’t make it obvious, no, I’m not running Windows

Yes, it’s not merely mounted, it’s mounted and editable.

Here’s the Apple Nova thread. It’s many pages deep and the downloadables and the instructions have changed as improvements were made, so don’t follow the instrux on the early pages.

Here is the page with the downloadable .dmg for MacFuse Core 0.2.2, of which the NTFS 3G driver is a module;

Here is the Apple Nova post with links to the downloadables for NTFS-3G 1.0 and MacFUSE Tools 0.2.2.

Borrowing from several additional posts on this Apple Nova thread (discarding the instructions that were supplanted with later updates, adding additional bits and pieces that were posted later), once you’ve done the install, this is how you deploy it:

@Instructions

1. Open Disk Utility.
2. Select your NTFS partition. In the toolbar, or in the File menu, select Unmount. It should become greyed out in the list, and disappear in the Finder.
3. Still in Disk Utility, Get Info on the partition. You should see a line like:
   Code:
   Disk Identifier : disk0s3
   This identifier is important, you’ll need it in a minute.
4. You need to manually create a mountpoint now (this is one fiddly thing left to fix, but a minor one):

sudo mkdir /Volumes/"Windows"

(Replace “Windows” accordingly. Make sure that, if your NTFS partition has spaces in its name, those too are wrapped in double quotes, like this:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/"Windows Partition"

)
4) Finally, mount it:

ntfs-3g /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/"Windows" -o ping_diskarb,volname="Windows"

The “disk0s3” above needs to be replaced with whatever your disk identifier actually is.

It should appear in Finder now. If it doesn’t, these two commands might help:

disktool -r

and:

killall Finder

The first refreshes disk arbitration (keeps mounted partitions in sync between Unix-y stuff and Mac OS-y stuff), and the second relaunches Finder.

I will add at this point that on my machine it did this in Terminal:

@AHunter3's Terminal

localhost:~ ahunter$ sudo ntfs-3g /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/“HELLO NTFS” -o ping_diskarb,volname=“HELLO NTFS”
Password:
mount_fusefs: fusefs@0 on /Volumes/HELLO NTFS: Operation not permitted

However, when I hit it a second time, it was more compliant:

@AHunter3's Terminal

localhost:~ ahunter$ sudo ntfs-3g /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/“HELLO NTFS” -o ping_diskarb,volname=“HELLO NTFS”
localhost:~ ahunter$

So if you get that far and get the “operation not permitted” thing, try running the same command a second time.

Now, to unmount the disk later on, if you’re so inclined (you don’t normally have to do this):
Code:
sudo umount /dev/disk0s4@0

This will also, however, remove the mountpoint. This means that, for now, every time you want to mount your partition as read-write, you have to follow the above steps of unmounting the read-only version, creating a mount point, and mounting a read/write version.

[E-Sabbath]

The new NTFS 3G driver is nice, isn’t it? And it took so long to get it, thanks to that moron who worked for novell way back when, who used proprietary information for the first try at it.
Merkey. That’s it. Jeff Merkey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Vernon_Merkey

Crazy guy.