Q: will mountain lion read/write to an NTFS external hard drive?

Could you give the driect download links for all three packages?

OSX Mountain Lion does have built-in support for NTFS, and it can read and write. However, Apple does not enable it by default. Doing so is easy, however. Carlos was close, but he forgot to include the nobrowse flag which is required.

Here is what you should do:

• Uninstall other 3rd-party NTFS software, like Paragon, Tuxera or NTFS-3G.
• Edit /etc/fstab (you can do this with "sudo nano /etc/fstab" as Carlos suggested
  • Add the following line:
    LABEL="THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_VOLUME" none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse
  • Quit your editor (if you used nano, you can do this with Control-X, Y, Enter as Carlos said)
• Reboot, or if you prefer just unmount and re-mount the partition using Disk Utility
• Voila! You have read-write support for this partition in OSX

Caveat: As of Mountain Lion, the nobrowse mount option is required for this to work. This means that the partition will not show up on your desktop. However, you can access it normally through Finder by either:

• Run Terminal and type "open /Volumes/THE_NAME_OF_YOUR_VOLUME" (without the quotes
• In Finder, press Apple + the up arrow over and over until you see all of your mounted volumes. Your volume will be listed here.

Enjoy! However, this is all at your own risk. My guess is that Apple didn't enable this by default because they want people to keep their data on the Mac side of the house. However, it could also be that the NTFS driver has bugs that could destroy your data. That being said, I would tend to trust the 1st-party implementation by Apple over 3rd-party implementations.

In Finder, press Apple + the up arrow over and over until you see all of your mounted volumes. Your volume will be listed here.

What where is the "Apple" in "Apple + the up arrow"?

He means the "Command" key (used to have an apple on it a long time ago) which is the key on either side of the space bar.

This solved my question - 10 points

I was able to get my write capabilty on my NTFS drive but only via drag and drop.  The drive does not appear in finder and cannot be saved to directly via any software. (due to the nobrowse option)

I did some reading online and found very few actual ways to get the drive to MOUNT other then recompling some kexts which is something I rather not get into.

I'm wondering if there is an easier way to get the write enabled NTFS partition to MOUNT correctly as a normal drive or are we once again screwed over by Apple.

DJ-Mushin wrote:

 

I was able to get my write capabilty on my NTFS drive but only via drag and drop.  The drive does not appear in finder and cannot be saved to directly via any software. (due to the nobrowse option)

 

I did some reading online and found very few actual ways to get the drive to MOUNT other then recompling some kexts which is something I rather not get into.

 

I'm wondering if there is an easier way to get the write enabled NTFS partition to MOUNT correctly as a normal drive or are we once again screwed over by Apple.

NTFS is a proprietary file system it is owned by Microsoft, MSDOS has been freed from licensing by Microsoft and anyone can use it, not so NTFS. So you've been screwed over by Microsoft.

Saad Raza wrote:

 

Could you give the driect download links for all three packages?

Don't use them.

Buy a copy of a supported and respected NTFS connector for your Mac. Paragon NTFS is by far the best.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/download.html

Regardless of it begin proprietary it hasn't stopped paragon or other 3rd parties from either paying the Licensing or clean-room reverse engineering. Both these options costing dollars.

So as usual Apple is screwing over, either through being cheap or just the usual policy they have of punishing there users for stepping outside there "holly" Apple ecosystem. (or conveniently both)

I use to run paragon NTFS but stopped after this one time my OSX crashed during boot up and it corrupted my NTFS partition.  Thus I stopped using it and reformatted one of my drives as extFAT but the other is still NTFS and would have liked to actually use it under OSX.

Send your opinion to Apple then.

DJ-Mushin wrote:

 

snip

 

So as usual Apple is screwing over, either through being cheap or just the usual policy they have of punishing there users for stepping outside there "holly" Apple ecosystem. (or conveniently both)

 

snip

 

I have no idea what the reference to holly means.

Holy, not Holly.  My apologies.

As far as feed back is concerned I seriously doubt they would care to hear my comments on there business model which makes them millions upon millions of dollars regardless of who it screws over and how.

So as usual Apple is screwing over, either through being cheap or just the usual policy they have of punishing there users for stepping outside there "holly" Apple ecosystem. (or conveniently both)

Couldn't Windows support HFS+, or are they just punishing you, too?

I don't think there would be anything wrong with that. (I have mac drive on my windows side)

I believe when your claiming this amazing multi-booting/platform feature you should do it right and properly transparent.  Not "just enough" to make it look like it is.

My main issue is that apple goes as far as giving you read capability but not write, or wirte but not as a fully mounted volume.  Like... common.

In the windows enviroment you don't even have read so it's not like your being teased with it. I've been running mac drive for years.  It's solid, never crashed, never corrupted anything.  Just sad that there isn't a solid product for the apple side (in my humble opinion that is)

That's OK, I totally disagree with your analysis, but you are free to believe it.

Sure Saad, here you go:

1. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/40156/osxfuse
2. http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Fuse-Wait.shtml
3. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

Let me know if that works for you