Enable NTFS Write support on Mac OS X El Capitan

Excellent thoughts, DRailroad.

Sounds like you would already know this, but MS has created their own very deep hole by trying to continue backward support for even DOS programs that are over 30 years old. eWeek covers lots of computer related topics, mostly towards the business end. They noted a couple of years ago that some very large, important firms still use custom software written for them decades ago as DOS apps. The hardware gets replaced at the desks of the users who need to access that app, so the need to continue to have an OS that will run it on the new computer remains. These companies have a lot of clout with MS because they each have multiple thousand seat licenses for Windows. As such, they can demand that new versions of Windows do not break their ability to use this old software. Why? Because getting it rewritten as an up-to-date Windows app, which would also require translating the massive amounts of data would cost millions of dollars in development time, testing, and down time.

A local furniture store chain had that same kind of setup. Everything nice and modern about the place except for the 286 and 386 DOS PCs at every service/order desk. We're talking old. Computers where the once light beige plastic monitor and computer chassis' were now a puke yellow. They used this system up until just a year or so ago. Either they were running out of old computers they could find to replace ones that died, or they just didn't like how backwards it made the organization appear, but they finally updated their ordering system to an all new Windows app and replaced their relic hardware with new computers.

I've read about that issue with NTFS a few times. One article suggested MS does it on purpose to make it harder for third party vendors to reverse engineer it. They think they have it, and MS changes NTFS again. Personally, I would thing MS changes NTFS to make it more efficient where they can, and to fix bugs that had gone unnoticed. Sounds more logical to me anyway than the conspiracy theory approach.

I still use Windows where necessary (very little, but still some need). I liked Windows 7 and think Windows 10 is pretty nice (the new Edge browser definitely needs work yet). But then MS occasionally reminds me why I try to avoid Windows. We were trying to install the demo of a 3D modeling app for testing. Wouldn't install under Windows 10 as the pull installer kept saying it couldn't find the remote server. The vendor says the paid app will run under Windows 10, but not the demo. Use Windows 7 or 8. Okay, so I wiped a laptop (after backing it up) that had Win 10 on it and installed Win 7, which it came with, from scratch. Per a very common and known issue with Windows 7, everything goes smoothly until after the SP1 update is done applying. It then forces you to update the updater before it will go any further. As soon as you do that, Windows Update stops working. It just spins forever looking for updates without ever finding anything. Called MS. To their credit, they did spends hours trying to figure out why Win 7 wouldn't update, including much time via remote access. They finally said they would do whatever it took to fix it for a one time fee of $99. I said, "Are you frickin' kidding? You want me to pay to fix an issue your own software created?" I hung up on them. After searching for hours, I finally found a user posted fix that actually worked.

Sounds like we've read from the same book, chapter and page with regards to MS. Bottom line, it took several years of constant prodding to get me to change over to Mac and now, when I do use MS for anything more intensive than Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, I'm immediately reminded of why I detest MS OSs.

In fact, those apps, Word, Excel and Outlook are the only things helping MS to survive and stay on top of the game. We use those apps frequently but that has probably become FAR less than 10 percent of the usage of these Macs. Outlook is still an outstanding email client and we actually use MS for email hosting for conformity, standardization, ensuring greater efficiency. But we keep the amount of time we have to touch those MS products to a minimum so troubleshooting is minimal relative to our OS X. We still use a couple of cheap Windows only desktops, running Windows 10, but for the little that we use those Windows desktops (mostly video conferencing, etc), they are problematic. Windows has just proved itself from my business experience to produce very fragile, vulnerable (from several different aspects) operating systems. Even a senior Microsoft manager acquaintance agreed with that, off the record and out of earshot of any witnesses of course!

Whenever I do have to personally use those Windows desktops, I immediately and automatically develop a dark cloud of disdain for Microsoft every time. We recently had to prep and format some legacy HDDs in NTFS, to send off to a client, and it was a real struggle ... just to get MS to recognize the drives (Macs had no problems even reading the NTFS formatt). In fact, Windows 7 would not recognize the drives consistently. We finally resorted to formatting the drives on the Macs as FAT32, then connecting to Windows (after several attempts!) to format the drives as NTFS. Good grief. More wasted time. The ghost of Microsoft still haunting me.

People living outside Apple's ecosystem know that NTFS is a more widely used format. E.g. a TV with a USB port is most likely to read an NTFS disk rather than an Apple formatted disk. Apple has solved so many difficult technical problems, I do not understand why it cannot write to NTFS.

It looks like a marketing decision: MACs can read from NTFS but cannot write. In other words: bring (read NTFS) your data to MAC but MAC will not give data back.

Pity

Once again, the best advice for folks with that view, obviously proponents and seemingly heavy users of Windows outdated file system is to return to an MS system only. Even MS's own newer operating systems have conflicts with drives formatted on olders OSs.

Although we still coexist in a heavily used MS business environment, little items like proprietary file systems have never been an issue in the 8+ years since we switched over to Apple and ... a productive environment! Users who are so reliant on an outdated, aging file system that they are inconvenienced by using Apple OS are on the wrong OS.

Kurt Lang wrote:

I would bet you remember the OS hodgepodge at the beginning of the personal computer revolution. It appears a lot of folks here don't remember it, or were much too young at the time..

Or they are old enough (like myself), to forget a lot of things. I still remember the IBM 1401 however. Heck, I remember punch cards. 😁

Kurt Lang wrote:

Heck, I remember punch cards. 😁

Me too. I didn't have to work with them, but my wife did. The thing you dreaded most was dropping a stack. 😮

or one wrong key stroke—and you had to toss the card and start over.

And now, it looks as though Multiple Sclerosis is heading in that direction once again, "...trying to get files from one system to another..." from some minor (?) issues we've been experiencing on customers' MS desktops.

Blaming Apple for not being able to access the closed, proprietary Microsoft NT File System format, is questionable. Microsoft has never published the internal of this file system format, and only the brave few have attempted to reverse engineer this "yet another proprietary lock-in-process" that Microsoft has so successfully used to maintain their monopoly. You'd think that Microsoft would be willing to do battle on a level playing field, but instead, leverages their dominance to mutate industry standards to force use of their own tools. Interoperability? Bah! Any attempt to use non-Microsoft products will be met with resistance, engineered into proprietary file formats, file system formats, protocols, unique Web protocols, etc.

A post must have been removed, or a couple. Yours and Kirk's comments appear to be answering something that isn't there.

@ Kirk,

Any attempt to use non-Microsoft products will be met with resistance, engineered into proprietary file formats, file system formats, protocols, unique Web protocols, etc.

I wonder how many remember the browser wars. Netscape and their Navigator browser pretty much had the field until MS released Internet Explorer with Windows 95. That was an extra paid browser, but they later made it free, all in the name of putting as many other browser competitors out of business as they could since none were free at the time. Worked on Netscape and a couple of others.

Then MS tried to make IE the de facto browser by implementing browser add-ons that would only work with IE. Namely, ActiveX. The whole idea was to make the web a Microsoft compatible experience only. Didn't have Windows? Well, then don't expect web pages to work right. Users finally fought back and the web has once again became what it's supposed to be - neutral to any OS or browser.

My all time favorite was the lawsuit brought against MS to allow users to remove IE from Windows. MS's lawyers made the outstandingly flagrant lie - in court - that IE had always been deeply rooted to Windows and could not be easily removed. I never heard if the courts fell for that. When IE was released with Windows 95, the only way to get it was by purchasing the separate Plus Pack. IE was on that installation DVD. It could be installed and uninstalled the same as any other app. So could at least the next version or two of IE. It wasn't until Windows 98 that MS built it into the OS as part of the installation.

It is time to point out that your advice and Apples advice are contradictory, I do not believe that you know better than Apple. So

To all who read this: Do not follow advice from IMJoseAngel under any circumstances.

Beginning with the Intel build of Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard, most releases have been certified as UNIX systems conforming to the Single UNIX Specification.

So... Not Unix?

Where, exactly, in the Single UNIX Specification is it required to support a specific File System?

And, bonus points, why would a UNIX specification direct support for a Proprietary File System written for a product that is not UNIX compliant.

Sorry, but the first discussion was about if OS X is Unix and yes. From the official Apple document of El Capitan, the KERNEL is based on FreeBSD. This is UNIX as far as I know.

In the other hand, the say in the same document that the Kernel supports NTFS (I remind you we are in XXI century with a great percentage of disk with this strange format 😝).

The thing is that Apple gives support just to NTFS (read-only). This doesn't mean you can't to mount it as RW as I do daily and without any issues from one since one year now. Is just a simple recomendation from a humble user. Leave people take their own decissions and do their own tests to find that is a secure way to work with NTFS.

Regards

You brought up the fact that OS X is UNIX certified, alluding that supporting NTFS is somehow required by the certification and is therefore safe, effective, without threat of data loss. UNIX does not require support for any specific file system, especially the half-baked, proprietary NTFS.

You even tried to reinforce your false appeal to authority:

This is not an Apple matter. This is Linux/Unix basics

The thing is that Apple gives support just to NTFS (read-only). This doesn't mean you can't to mount it as RW as I do daily and without any issues from one since one year now. Is just a simple recomendation from a humble user. Leave people take their own decissions and do their own tests to find that is a secure way to work with NTFS.

That's great that it works for you. But, you should let people know that the method is unsupported, and being that it is unsupported, others have reported complete data loss.

Sorry, but I referred to the Unix kernel supporting NTFS as defined by Apple. For me Unix or Linux is the Kernel and if NTFS is supported, is supported. What is clear for me is that this was the first and the last time I try to help in this forum. Thanks for your way of keeping the knowledge (Good or bad, independently of your criteria).

Good bye guys

And by your analogy bees like birds because they both start with "B".

Apple officially supports Read only support of NTFS. It does not support Read/Write of NTFS.

It is possible to mount an NTFS volume in OS X using native components, but it is not officially supported--likely because it was only implemented for testing--and it failed.