A bit of background

Occasionally I need to share files with my colleagues via USB sticks. Since we are working on different platforms the sticks might be NTFS-formatted. No problem so far, there are several resources out to the web describing to accomplish this task, e.g.

I personally have chosen the more pragmatic way, just open a terminal and issue some mount commands like:

        macbook:~ uwe$ sudo umount /Volumes/UNTITLED
        macbook:~ uwe$ sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,auto,nobrowse /dev/disk3s1 ~/ntfs-volume

However, tired of typing this over and over, I have written Mounty to accomplish exactly this - but in a much more convenient fashion. So, under the hood, it happens an unmount and a remount short after, followed by opening a Finder window pointing to the hidden mount point.

Please let me know if this tool is also useful to you; and do not hesitate to ask a question that might appear using Mounty.

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 :)

Version History

Version 1.12 - 6th of February 2021

• when macOS appearance switched between light and dark, the status icon was not updated accordingly, this is fixed now
• the dark appearance icons are dimmed a bit now
• added tolerance to volume kind label if its not exactly written as "ntfs" but contains the "ntfs" string

Version 1.11 - 24th of Jan 2021

• new icons for dark appearance
• compiled as universal binary including both x86_64 and arm64 architectures to run natively on Intel and Apple Silicon
• notifications were not thrown because the authorisation request was missing, this is fixed now

Version 1.10 - 29th of Nov 2020, this version is only compatible with macOS 11 Big Sur and up

• remove deprecations: update of notification framework
• added disclaimer on first startup

Version 1.9 - 21th of Sep 2018, last version compatible with macOS Catalina and earlier

• bug fix for crash when Volume does not contain UUID (e.g. MBR Disk)
• Note: Old devices which does not contain UUID cannot be tracked for auto-mount
• Russian Credits Page added (again, thanks to Anton)

Version 1.8 - 12th of Sep 2018

• Added Russian Localization (thanks to Anton)
• Added feature to automount volumes (without the notification)
• fixed equal volume name bug

Version 1.7 - 4th of Nov 2017

• Localizations updates ane new ones:
• - Portuguese (thanks to Carlos)
  - Chinese corrections, thanks to Barry
  - new Chinese Traditional, thanks to Barry
  - Brazilian (thanks to Bruno)
  - Spanish (thanks to Daniel)
  - Korean (thanks to Kim Jinbong)
• As far as I have tested, this version runs perfectly on Mac OS High Sierra.

Version 1.6 - 2th of June 2017

• Localizations Updates:
• Thanks to the community, bunch of corrections were made to improve the Google translations of
  - Chinese (thanks to Gerald and Yang)
  - Italian (thanks to Emanuelle and Helmo)
  - French (thanks to Dominique)
  - new: Dutch (thanks to Ferdi)

Version 1.5 - 26th of May 2017

• Localizations (incomplete and made by Google. If you want to contribute, please download the Localization String File, correct it, and send new version to me).

Version 1.4 - 25th of May 2017

• Compatibility update to fix an issue with macOS 10.12.5
• Added new status: Mounts is operating: The re-mount of larger volumes can take a while. When mounts is working you cannot accidentally issue another action anymore.

Version 1.3 - 29th of January 2017

• Smaller tray icon
• Fixed some possible memory leaks
• Added modal alert when drive has spaces in names: I am using DADiskMountWithArguments API from Disk Arbitration framework and when there are spaces in volume name the remount action will fail with unknown error. If you have an idea how to solve it, please let me know.

Version 1.2 - 9th of November 2015

• Fixed a problem where volumes appears as not re-mountable by mistake intermittently.

Version 1.1 - 27th of July 2014

The Appstore Sandbox restrictions does not allow sandboxed apps to re-mount external volumes. We have rejected Mounty from Mac Appstore for that reason and decided to distribute it for free, without Sandbox capability.

Mounty uses Apple's Notification Center to issue notification whenever a NTFS volume to re-mount is detected. If you want to re-mount a volume from a notification please change the alert style to "Alert" for Mounty from Notification Center Settings in System Settings application.

DISCLAIMER

The Mounty NTFS Tool is provided "as is" without any warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. In no event will the author of this tool or any of its partners be liable to you for any damages, including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use or inability to use this program (including but not limited to any loss of profit or savings, loss of data or a failure of the program to operate with any other programs), even if the author of this tool or any of its partners has been advised of the possibility of such damages.