Jan 06, 2016 To get NTFS-3G to work, we need to replace the built-in /sbin/mountntfs binary, which is linked to Apple's NTFS driver, with NTFS-3G's mountntfs. This was a pretty easy thing to do before OS X 10.11 El Capitan, but due to System Integrity Protection, it is now slightly harder.
Summary
Disk Utility got a facelift with the launch of OS X El Capitan. But this makeover didn’t go well for a handful of Mac users. Some of them find difficult to perform regular disk management activities on Apple hard disk drives including partitioning the disk, creating, resizing and deleting a partition.
Good News Arriving Soon
Very soon we will need to partition our Mac hard drive in order to make room for macOS Sierra installation which Apple announced this WWDC 2016 in San Francisco.
Tip
But before the time arrives to partition the Mac hard drive for macOS Sierra installation, it is equally necessary to backup the data on Mac startup disk drive to avoid losing any files during the upgrade or installation processes.
OS X El Capitan Partitioning
With the help of screenshots, I will be explaining some basic set of activities that are to be done while partition the OS X El Capitan drive. Alternatively, the same procedure will be explained with the help of a disk manager utility known as Stellar Partition Manager.
Background
I am using an old 40 GB external hard drive to create, resize and delete partition with Disk Utility and Stellar Partition Manager software.
** Resolving Partition Option Greyed Out issue
- Select the external disk from the left side of Disk Utility
- Unfortunately, the Disk Utility partition option is greyed out (see below screenshot)
Solution: Select the ‘Generic USB Disk Media’ and the partition option will become active.
Partition Button is Now Active
Click the Partition button to start partitioning the external drive
Paragon Ntfs For El Capitan
Task 1) To create 3 Partitions of below sizes (using Disk Utility)
- Partition A = 20 GB
- Partition B = ~10 GB
- Partition C = ~10 GB
Step 1) Enter partition name and format i.e. ‘Partition A’ and ‘OS X Extended Journaled’
Step 2) Enter partition size i.e. 20 GB. Press Return and slider will automatically take 20 GB. Else drag the slider to occupy 20 GB of spaces for partition A.
Now select the 19.7 GB of the remaining hard drive spaces and click (+) plus sign. Name the 2 partitions as B and C.
Partition B and C Size
As shown above, the external hard drive is divided into 3 partitions of sizes 20GB, and two almost 10 Gb of partitions. Click Apply to save the changes.
Outcome Looks Good
Task 2) To resize the 3 partitions as below requirement (using Disk Utility)
- Resize ‘Partition A’ to 15 GB
- Resize Partition B to ~12 GB
- Resize ‘Partition C’ to ~13 GB
Now, here the problems arrives
Unable to resize Mac partition
Entered 15 GB for Partition A and pressed Return. The ‘Partition A’ shrinks to 15 GB but created a new partition of 5 Gb, which is unused.
Now as per our second task, we need to create around 12 Gb for Partition B. Let’s see if Disk Utility allows us to do it perfectly.
Unfortunately, neither the mouse slider nor the Size box is accepting the Partition B to expand to ~ 12 Gb in size. The same issue is bothering ‘Partition C’ which is not expanding to ~13 Gb of size either through the partition slider or with the help of the size box.
No Productivity
Since the partitioning as mentioned in Task 2 cannot be done with the help of Disk Utility on OS X El Capitan we will choose to achieve this task with the help of Stellar Partition Manager utility.
Stellar Partition Manager
Task 3) To resize the 3 partitions as below requirement (using Mac disk manager software)
- Resize ‘Partition A’ to 15 GB
- Resize Partition B to ~12 GB
- Resize ‘Partition C’ to ~13 GB
Witness the difference b/w Disk Utility and Stellar Partition Manager
Fortunately, Stellar Partition Manager utility collects all the available free spaces on the Mac hard drive or an external hard drive and uses it efficiently for resizing the Mac partitions.
Stellar Partition Manager
Now let’s achieve our tasks
** Resize ‘Partition A’ to 15 GB by using the mouse to drag the edge and shrink the partition size from 20 GB to 15 GB
** Time to resize ‘Partition B’ to ~ 12 GB
El Capitan Mac Os
12 GB Resize Easily Done
** Time to resize / expand ‘Partition C’ to claim all available free spaces. In the above screenshot, you can see that Partition C is of size 8.3 Gb and only 1.74 GB of free spaces are available. Hence it will take all the free spaces but this external hard drive is only 40 in size so the final size of the Partition C will be 9.42 GB.
Mac Partition Resizing Done Successfully With Stellar Partition Manager
Click the Start button mounted on the top menu bar to apply the changes. Hence, we have achieved the partition-resizing task up to 90% with the help of Stellar Partition Manager utility. Concluding this article with: How to create bootable USB on Mac with Stellar Partition Manager application.
NTFS support in OS X is disappointing. You plug in a USB flash drive from a co-worker who uses Windows to simply copy over a file, only to realize that you can't actually write to NTFS-formatted drives on Mac out of the box.
That's kind of lame, to be honest. It's 2016, Apple, wake up! People who work together in the same office, on different operating systems, should be able to exchange files via USB flash drive with ease, without having to worry about formatting their drives with a cross-platform filesystem, like exFAT.
Solutions
There are a few ways to enable NTFS write support on OS X.
- Using the built-in NTFS drivers - Writing to NTFS drives is a functionality that's been built into OS X for some time. However, it's disabled by default for NTFS volumes, and for good reason. It's extremely buggy and corrupts entire volumes in certain situations. I tried copying 4GB worth of data to an NTFS volume this way, and the transfer just failed half-way, rendering the disk inaccessible and my computer unbootable, until I manually disconnected the SATA cable from the hard drive. Luckily, hot-plugging the drive to Windows 7 and running
dskchkfixed the issue, but other people reported losing all of their data because of these faulty drivers. Therefore, I strongly advise against this method. - Purchasing Tuxera/Paragon NTFS for Mac - A viable option, albeit quite expensive (Tuxera - $26.50, Paragon - $19.95), at least for something that should already be included with the OS. I shouldn't have to pay good money to be able to write to an NTFS volume. There has to be another way.
- Downloading and installing OSXFUSE and NTFS-3G - The winning option. NTFS-3G is an NTFS read/write driver that is free and open-source, and there don't seem to be any corruption issues arising from using it.
Installing OSXFUSE
So, what is OSXFUSE anyway?
FUSE for OS X allows you to extend OS X's native file handling capabilities via third-party file systems. As a user, installing the OSXFUSE software package will let you use any third-party file system written atop OSXFUSE or MacFUSE, if you choose to install the MacFUSE compatibility layer.
So basically, it's a way for developers to extend OS X's native file handling APIs to other file systems.
It's required by NTFS-3G, so let's go ahead and install the latest OSXFUSE (3.x.x) from here:
https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/releases
Download the latest osxfuse-3.x.x.dmg attachment, mount it, and install it, as with any other .dmg.
Note: Make sure to select the MacFUSE Compatibility Layer in the installation options. NTFS-3G depends on it.
Installing NTFS-3G
Once that's done, we can go ahead and install NTFS-3G. But not so fast, we need Homebrew for that.
Ntfs For El Capital One
Verify that you have Homebrew installed by running:
If you don't, install it using this one-liner:
In any case, go ahead and update the Homebrew formula:
Next, let's finally install NTFS-3G via Homebrew:
Replacing Mount_NTFS
To get NTFS-3G to work, we need to replace the built-in /sbin/mount_ntfs binary, which is linked to Apple's NTFS driver, with NTFS-3G's mount_ntfs.
This was a pretty easy thing to do before OS X 10.11 El Capitan, but due to System Integrity Protection, it is now slightly harder.
System Integrity Protection is a security technology in OS X El Capitan that's designed to help prevent potentially malicious software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac.
It restricts the root account and limits the actions that the root user can perform on protected parts of OS X.
Therefore, we can't simply swap out the binary by using sudo and running ln. That is, not until we disable System Integrity Protection.
Disabling SIP
Reboot your Mac, and hold Cmd + R to enter Recovery mode. Within the Terminal, enter the following command to disable SIP and reboot back into OS X:
Replacing the Binary Link
Boot into OS X, and open a Terminal window. Within the Terminal, enter the following commands to swap out the link to the native mount_ntfs binary with a link to NTFS-3G's mount_ntfs binary:
Re-enabling SIP
Reboot into Recovery mode again, this time, to re-enable SIP. Within the Terminal, enter the following command to enable SIP and reboot back into OS X:
That's It!
NTFS-3G will automatically mount your NTFS volumes in read-and-write mode once you reboot back into OS X. Go ahead and copy some files over to an NTFS volume to make sure it works. Well done!