Write To NTFS Drives With OS X Lion
After upgrading my Mac from OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard to OS X 10.7.3 Lion, I discovered I could no longer write files to external NTFS-formatted drives. The problem is MacFUSE which, I found out, does not support the new 64-bit kernel. If this is happening to you, you must remove the old MacFUSE and install the newer version, which does support the 64-bit kernel. Here's how.
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After upgrading my Mac to Lion, I discovered I was no longer able to write files to external NTFS-formatted drives, such as my backup Drobo.
On Snow Leopard I used MacFUSE with a NTFS-3G hack. NTFS-3G, a plug-in for MacFUSE, works with the new OS, but MacFUSE doesn't because of its lack of support for the new 64-bit kernel. At least the fix is fairly straightforward. Read on.
Until recently, the only way to fix MacFUSE's incompatibility with Lion was to install Xcode and Macports and compiling a bunch of code. None of that is necessary anymore. To get NTFS file systems into read/write mode I recommend removing the old MacFUSE (only if you used it before upgrading to Lion). If the uninstall button in the preferences panel doesn't work, control click on the preferences panel icon and select remove. Reboot your machine.
Next, download MacFuse from Tuxera. Version 2.2 is 64-bit compatible and can be found here. If you haven't installed NTFS-3G, download this. The Oct. 11, 2010 version is the most current, working binary. Again, double click the install NTFS-3G package and follow the instructions. When prompted to choose No caching or UBLIO caching, I recommend UBLIO. The performance boost is worth the very minor risk. And if you're paranoid, just make sure to copy your files to the external drive, not move them.
Reboot. Once both are installed, you might get an error message like this one.
Fixing the error message requires this patch. The patch replaces the fuse_wait part of Fuse4x with an unofficial version that gets rid of the timeout error. Run the installer package and follow the instructions.
Now you should be able to write to NTFS-formatted drives without annoying error messages. There are many, many other guides on the Internet that add unnecessary steps to solving this problem. Remember: all you need is the fuse_wait.pkg.
Now you should be able to write to NTFS-formatted drives without annoying error messages. There are many, many other guides on the Internet that add unnecessary steps to solving this problem. Remember: all you need is the fuse_wait.pkg.
After upgrading my Mac to Lion, I discovered I was no longer able to write files to external NTFS-formatted drives, such as my backup Drobo.
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