If you applied this hack to an NTFS partition on your Macbook, you would have to restart the Macbook. Press the ENTER key and this changes to Wrote 1 line depending on how many lines are contained in the fileĮject your hard drive safely and plug it back in. Press CTRL + O to save the fstab file and as circled below, you’ll see File Name to Write: /etc/fstab. The command for each drive you configure must be on a line of their own. LABEL= DRIVE_NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowseĪs shown below I have two NTFS drives configured already. Type in the following command making sure to change DRIVE_NAME to the name of your NTFS external hard drive or partition. You’ll be asked to provide your computer’s password after which the Fstab editor will open. Launch Terminal and type in the following command sudo nano /etc/fstab Plug your hard drive into the computer and confirm the name of the drive via Finder. I don’t know if putting an underscore in between words work. If it has two, you’d need to change it to one. Make sure your external drive has a one word name. Finally reboot your Macbook before performing this to avoid any unforeseen conflicts. I only did this on my 1TB and 2TB Western Digital external portable hard drives. Also I did not try this on my Bootcamp partition as I wasn’t in the mood for surprises. It was completely formatted with Yosemite. NOTE: I did this on a Macbook Pro Retina with a fresh install of Mac OS Yosemite i.e the machine wasn’t upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite. The process is quite simple and flawless but as always you’re advised to backup your Macbook before proceeding should in case something goes wrong and results in data loss. While there are third party apps out there that can enable this function, they are somewhat of pricey thus my glee when last night I discovered that you could actually write to NTFS partitions on Mac OS X by just editing a simple file called fstab. Mac OS X by default doesn’t allow you to edit files on NTFS formatted drives be it an internal NTFS partition or an external USB flash/hard drive with NTFS format.

How to write to ntfs on mac