Nick's Blog

Just found this post on the macrumers forum. It’s for getting NTFS read and write permissions on Mac OSX, this is usually used on formatted external hard drives. For my own future reference but also for others, here it is:

iBlacky of the same forum posted a better method. Basically, it’s running mount_ntfs with read/write option specified.

Here’s how it’s done in Terminal:

sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig

sudo nano /sbin/mount_ntfs

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/mount_ntfs.orig -o rw “$@”

(press Enter, Ctrl-O, Enter, Ctrl-X in sequence)

sudo chown root:wheel /sbin/mount_ntfs
sudo chmod 755 /sbin/mount_ntfs

Make sure to check that mount_ntfs is listed as -rwxr-xr-x and root wheel when you type ls -al /sbin/mount_ntfs and you’re good to go.

P.S.
If it isn’t working for you, it may be that the NTFS partition wasn’t cleanly unmounted previously (e.g. not using safe eject in Windows). To check if this is the case, open Console in Utilities, and go to ‘All Messages’ instead of ‘Console Messages’. Search for ‘ntfs’ and you may come across an error that displays like this:

NTFS-fs error (device /dev/disk3s1, pid 435): ntfs_system_inodes_get(): $LogFile is not clean. Mounting read-only. Mount in Windows.

You need to plug the disk into Windows-running system, and do a safe eject. Then the NTFS partition will mount in read/write mode.

In case you don’t like it:
sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig /sbin/mount_ntfs

Source: Macrumors forum