NTFS drives on macOS Sonoma

I am having the same issue. Today I updated my OS to Sonoma 14.2.1 and now my external hard drive is read only. Something in Apple's update knocked out the driver. Anyone have a solution? My entire work archive is on that drive.

The NTFS support I'm using is from Paragon. The disks will show up in Disk Utility as well as the Paragon utility, but they do not mount (see the error I posted earlier in this thread). This screams of issues with the driver.

Paragon has a myriad of organizational problems:

• They're based in Germany, so their response times (if you get one) can be lengthy, especially if you're in the U.S. EST time zone.
• They have absolutely no kind of interactive support -- no chat, phone support, etc. All you can do is open a ticket and hope for the best. I did this and still haven't heard back.
• Their community support (message boards) are pretty much dark these days, which makes me wonder how many people actually use this thing.
• Their software and drivers are ridiculously expensive. Mine came with the Seagate drive I bought, but still. $50 for a piece of middleware software (which is essentially just a driver with a pretty face) is wildly ridiculous.

I come from the Open Source community and issues with closed-source like this are insanely frustrating. Not that everyone can do this, but if I had access to the source code, I could fix the driver myself and have it working. As it stands, the (literal) Paragon gestapo controls that.

Now, having said all that...As I stated earlier, I use my drive in my VM. I recently used my VM with the drive connected (it was physically connected to my Mac, but the file system still wouldn't mount). After I was done "doing stuff" (playing EQ2...lol) on the VM, the drive automatically attached back to my Mac as per my configuration. The drive auto-connected, the file system mounted properly and I can read/write to/from the disk as expected from MacOS.

I'm not saying the solution is to get Parallels and use it like I do in order to get the drive working, but this kind of behavior tells me the Paragon driver is quite flaky and the developers need to step up.

There are other 3rd party NTFS-for-Mac solutions out there, but what really needs to happen is Apple must knuckle under and support non-Apple file systems natively so we don't have to deal with this nonsense. This silly attempt to try to lock out non-Apple solutions is stupid and, quite honestly, childish. I love Apple products and feel there's nothing better, but this is one of Apple's business practices that is preventing them from gaining more marketshare in OS space.

Hi MacMikeinOK,

Yes, it appeared in Disk Utility. I downloaded all of my info off the seagate drive, erased and reformatted to XFat and it seems to be working now.

This is definitely not a good way for Apple to serve their customers. I've wasted most of the day dealing with this.

You're missing the point. When I said "support for non-Apple filesystems", I meant full unobstructed support. The examples you offered are read-only. In fact, in order to make NTFS read-only, you have to specifically build it with the options to cripple it. Read-only NTFS means Apple specifically built it to not allow writes.

As for other file systems, there is a plethora of file systems you can't run on MacOS without 3rd-party software, or ones that have been ported via Homebrew (yes, I know all about Fuse, so please don't mention it):

1. XFS
2. ZFS
3. EXT3/4

just to name a few.

Even though these are normally Linux file systems, they have all been ported from other OSes (this is why Open Source is such a massive benefit to the world). In this day and age, a computer is more than just a device on a desk (or lap) -- it's a portal into a larger computing world where different systems seamlessly communicate with each other to provide an all-around end-to-end solution.

Lynn Herring wrote:

Hi MacMikeinOK,

Yes, it appeared in Disk Utility. I downloaded all of my info off the seagate drive, erased and reformatted to XFat and it seems to be working now.

This is definitely not a good way for Apple to serve their customers. I've wasted most of the day dealing with this.

I agree that Apple most likely made changes in Sonoma that adversely affected drives formatted in NTFS. But I'm glad you were able to get things sorted (albeit taking forever to accomplish).

SOLUTION:

1. Check your Paragon NTFS version on your mac. It must be at least 15.11.840. This version support Mac OS Sonoma
2. If it less update your version in plugin.
3. If update in plugin does not work go step 4 (as for me)
4. Just download it from site (link) and start reinstall by instruction here: https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/29957

P.S. I use WD hard driver, so this instruction fully help me

Kinyen wrote:

There are other 3rd party NTFS-for-Mac solutions out there, but what really needs to happen is Apple must knuckle under and support non-Apple file systems natively so we don't have to deal with this nonsense. This silly attempt to try to lock out non-Apple solutions is stupid and, quite honestly, childish. I love Apple products and feel there's nothing better, but this is one of Apple's business practices that is preventing them from gaining more marketshare in OS space.

Apple does support non-Apple filesystems natively. Out of the box, macOS can

• Read from, and write to, FAT32 volumes
• Read from, and write to, exFAT volumes
• Read from NTFS volumes

On the other hand, out of the box, Windows cannot

• Read or write HFS+ volumes
• Read or write APFS volumes

This, even though I believe that Apple published source code for a HFS+ filesystem driver as part of the Darwin Open Source code distribution, many years ago.

I erased and reformatted my external hard drive. This is not cool what you’ve done Apple! The software updates should not undo what has been working for years!

If I had to guess, the OP is experiencing the same problem I'm having -- it's with Paragon NTFS For Mac. This happened to me before. I updated to Sonoma and had to download updated drivers from Paragon. This morning I had a Sonoma update (14.2.1 as the OP described) and Paragon stopped working again.

The drive is visible within both the Paragon utility and Disk Utility. When trying to mount from within Paragon, it fails silently (no error messages, popups, etc). When mounting this same drive from within Disk Utility, I receive the following error:

"Could not mount "Gray Seagate" (com.apple.DiskManagemet.disenter error 49153)"

I contacted Paragon (via headless support form/email ... UGH) and I'm waiting to hear back. Normally Paragon is a paid product (~$49.95 USD) but it came included with the Seagate drive I bought (they have a provision for supporting bundled versions). The only real reason to need NTFS on the Mac side is to be able to write to the drive.

I use my NTFS drive in a Parallels VM -- for Windows-only games that are too clueless to make a Mac version :) -- and I'm thinking of just dumping all Mac NTFS support altogether and let my Windows VM manage the disk because the ability to write to NTFS from within MacOS is more of a convenience than anything else and certainly not worth $50 to me.

Hi, did you have any solution to this or advice from Paragon? Having the same issue with an external drive which up until now was reading fine on my Mac but now won’t mount & had the same error message 😬

I had to reboot my computer after installing an unrelated kernel extension. Once the system came back up, I was able to read and write to the drive. I've since had to reboot a few times for various reasons (usually kext modules) and the problem hasn't returned.

NOTE: I'm not saying rebooting is the fix. That's a Microsoft solution ;)

Do any of them appear in Disk Utility? Are you using any kind of NTFS software that, perhaps, isn't compatible with MacOS Sonoma?

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