After a brief installation process, Mounty runs in the background and displays a small mountain icon on your Mac's menu bar. After that, anytime you connect a NTFS device, the app will ask if you want to mount it, and you will then be able to read and write it as normal. Mounty is a popular Mac utility that allows you to mount NTFS external drives as writable volumes. It sits on the Mac menu bar and provides easy access to mount & unmount NTFS volumes as read/write. Install Mounty on Mac. Launch the app and ensure it is running from the menu bar.
Some questions that might come up
My NTFS disk disappears from Desktop when using Mounty
Unfortunately this is by design.
Mounty is using the Apple kernel driver. It allows read/write mount of NTFS drives only with the 'nobrowse' option. The mount point becomes hidden and disappears from Desktop and Finder menu. To make it easier to re-locate the drive I have added the 'Show in Finder' option in Mounty menu.
My USB stick will not re-mount. An alert is popping up telling me to re-attach the stick, but this doesn't help.
This can happen when the USB stick is not cleanly unmounted from the Windows PC. If you simply unplug the USB stick from PC without using the little tray icon to detach the hardware correctly, the volume will be marked as 'not cleanly unmounted'. There might be some dirty sectors left and Mac OS X will not be able to re-mount in read-write mode for that reason.
Suddenly all my files disappeared - please help!
This is usually happen when not all files are written properly due to an unmount operation not finishing. The NTFS partition might be marked as 'dirty' and the Apple NTFS driver cannot recover from that situation. Mounty will not delete anything by itself, please try to restore your files on a Windows PC using usual recovery s/w, i.e. chkdsk command line utility or professional tools like GetDataBack for Windows. If you do not own any Windows you can use tools for macOS that can deal with NTFS partition maintenance, like Paraogn Harddisk Manager or Tuxera Disk Manager.
Sometimes the files are grayed out and cannot be modified anymore.
This is because the file has extended attributes, refer to the Manpage of xattr for further explanation. If you open the file path in terminal application, you can list the attributes with ls -l@ <filename>, and remove those attributes with xattr -d com-apple.<attribute> <filename>, i.e.: xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo testfile.txt
Unable to re-mount in read/write mode when trying to mount Windows 10 partition
If you try to mount a Windows System partition, Mounty might fail when Hibernation feature is enabled. There is a Fast Start feature in Windows which might be enabled by default, and this is causing the drive to be locked. Within Windows running, you need to run the command powercfg /hibernate off in an admin powershell and restart Windows to disable this feature and remove the lock to enable it for Mounty. Thanks to Art Schultz pointing that out.
Mounty will not recognize a drive or re-mount read/write even if the drive is NTFS formatted actually
We have seen that certain third-party NTFS tools will re-name the volume kind property of an NTFS drive to something other than 'ntfs'. In this case it might happen that the macOS kernel driver ist not able to re-mount in read/write mode anymore. Thanks to Giovanni for his patience to reveal this issue during a remote debug session :)
Mounty is a Free NTFS Enabler Application for macOS which mounts NTFS as writeable in macOS.
Features:
- Easy: A menu icon; You will be notified if there is any volume connected to the computer which is NTFS formatted and ready to re-mount in read-write mode.
- Light: A simple design; Mounty for NTFS comes without any decorations.No additional driver will be installed. It simply makes use of the build-in mechanisms already provided by Mac OS X Mavericks - no strings attached.
Issues
Volume not re-mountable.
This can happen when the USB stick is not cleanly unmounted from the Windows PC. If you simply unplug the USB stick from PC without using the little tray icon to detach the hardware correctly, the volume will be marked as 'not cleanly unmounted'. There might be some dirty sectors left and macOS will not be able to re-mount in read-write mode for that reason.
Suddenly all my files disappeared.
This is usually happen when not all files are written properly due to an unmount operation not finishing. The NTFS partition might be marked as 'dirty' and the Apple NTFS driver cannot recover from that situation. Mounty will not delete anything by itself, please try to restore your files on a Windows PC using usual recovery softwares, i.e. chkdsk command line utility.
Sometimes the files are grayed out and cannot be modified anymore.
This is because the file has extended attributes, refer to the Manpage of xattr for further explanation. If you open the file path in terminal application, you can list the attributes with ls -l@ <filename>, and remove those attributes with xattr -d com-apple.<attribute> <filename>, i.e.: xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo testfile.txt
Unable to re-mount in read/write mode when trying to mount Windows 10 partition
Mounty For Mac Free Download
If you try to mount a Windows System partition, Mounty might fail when Hibernation feature is enabled. There is a Fast Start feature in Windows which might be enabled by default, and this is causing the drive to be locked. Within Windows running, you need to run the command powercfg /hibernate off in an admin powershell and restart Windows to disable this feature and remove the lock to enable it for Mounty.