Big Sur won't mount my NTFS Formatted ext drive like my Catalina Machine

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Level 1

16 points

Big Sur won't mount my NTFS Formatted ext drive like my Catalina Machine

My current 2020 Macbook Air that is running Catalina reads and writes to my Seagate hard Drive just fine. Macs will read and write to NTFS formatted drives if you download the Paragon driver....until Big Sur. I recently purchase a Mac Mini that is running Big Sur and it will NOT even mount the NTFS drive nor does it allow you to download the appropriate driver. The only fix I have found is to reformat the disk to EXFAT but reformatting would erase the data and I'm not prepared to do that yet. I found an article on reddit and techies.com that many people are having this problem in Big Sur but the coding changes they said may work in Terminal did not fix the problem.

Any suggestions?

Posted on Jan 11, 2021 10:32 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Encryptor5000

Level 5

7,662 points

Jan 11, 2021 12:23 PM in response to ecleage

Hi ecleage,

As mentioned by hcsitas, the issue is likely due to Paragon. macOS Big Sur started deprecating traditional kernel extensions and moved towards system extensions (which don't run in kernelspace, but rather in userspace). Paragon's driver probably relied on being a traditional kernel extension and didn't update it to become a system extension.

Are you able to mount the NTFS drive as read-only in macOS Big Sur if the Paragon driver is uninstalled? Or does it still fail to mount?

EDIT: If it still fails to mount, you might have to copy the data onto a differently formatted drive or partition, as suggested by hcsitas. If your iTunes library takes up less than half of the total drive space, you could create a temporary second partition and format that as ExFAT, then copy the data onto there, erase the first partition as ExFAT, then copy the data back.

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Answer 2

ecleage Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 11, 2021 1:50 PM in response to Encryptor5000

Thanks. I already have a copy of the library on another Seagate 4TB drive so I will reformat the new 8TB to Mac Os Extended and then copy the files back.

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Answer 3

hcsitas

Level 6

13,964 points

Jan 11, 2021 11:34 AM in response to ecleage

No need to lose data, copy it to another exFAT using a spare Windows machine. Then reformat, upgrade to Big Sur and reconnect spare. You could try Paragon but their days of free money piggybacking on Apple look over. Dump ‘em. Enjoy...

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Answer 4

hcsitas

Level 6

13,964 points

Jan 11, 2021 11:02 AM in response to ecleage

Contact Paragon, or dump NTFS. I recommend the latter, good luck.

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Answer 5

ecleage Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 11, 2021 11:27 AM in response to hcsitas

Thanks. I might have to reformat to EXFAT but it would mean losing the data on the drive. I was trying to avoid that. It's my iTunes library and takes two full days to copy to another drive to back and the will take another two days to add back. It still works on my Catalina machines. So Frustrating.

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Answer 6

ecleage Author

Level 1

16 points

Jan 11, 2021 2:00 PM in response to Encryptor5000

One last question for you guys. what is the best format for the hard drive? I k now if I use ExFat, I will be able to use it with both Mac and PC but my understanding is that I may experience performance or stability issue with that. So is Mac OS Extended, Journaled better?

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