NTFS write in macOS BigSur using osxfuse and ntfs-3g

kumar shivang
2 min readDec 19, 2020

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Install osxfuse and ntfs-3g

brew install --cask osxfusebrew install ntfs-3g

Disable FileVault and SIP

  1. Go to settings, then Security & Privacy, then FileVault, then Turn off FileVault.
  2. Restart or shut down your Mac and while starting, press Command + R key combination. This will get you to Recovery mode.
  3. In Recovery mode, open Terminal application from Utilities in the top menu. Disable System Integrity Protection with command:
csrutil disable
csrutil authenticated-root disable

4. Restart your Mac and go to your normal macOS.

Update /sbin/mount_ntfs

  1. Run mount and chop off the last s, e.g. if your root is /dev/disk1s1s1, you'll mount /dev/disk1s1
  2. Create mkdir ~/mount

Let’s call: /dev/disk1s1 as DISK_PATH, and ~/mount as MOUNT_PATH

3. Run sudo mount -o nobrowse -t apfs DISK_PATH MOUNT_PATH

sudo mv ~/mount/sbin/mount_ntfs ~/mount/sbin/mount_ntfs.original
sudo ln -s /usr/local/sbin/mount_ntfs ~/mount/sbin/mount_ntfs

4. Run sudo bless --folder MOUNT_PATH/System/Library/CoreServices --bootefi --create-snapshot

5. Reboot your system, and the changes will take place

Enable SIP

Restart or shut down your Mac and while starting, press Command + R key combination. This will get you to Recovery mode.

csrutil enable

One Last Thing

Everything will work fine in terminal now, but finder still wouldn’t work properly. To fix this “-o auto_xattr” in “/usr/local/sbin/mount_ntfs” in “ntfs-3g” command

using your fav editor and save forcibly since it is readonly file. Using vim just do: ‘:w!’

Reference:

1: https://medium.com/macoclock/enabling-ntfs-write-in-macos-10-15-catalina-the-open-source-way-a5fd0d1cb32e

2: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/395508/mount-root-as-writable-in-big-sur

3: https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/574

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