MacOS – No NTFS Access Using Paragon and Tuxera in Yosemite

I stumbled on a post on IM.GETTING(THIS);, which explained the issue — and even provided a fix!

The problem seems to stem from the binary "fuse_wait" from NTFS-3G that's run as a final part of the mounting procedure - for some reason it can't detect that ntfs-3g mounted the volume and stays on a hopeless loop trying to detect this condition until it gives up after 15 seconds. So my workaround involves replacing the fuse_wait binary with a script that does more or less the same thing, but actually detecting (sort of) the mount operation and not timing out.

The fix

(Assuming the use of MacFUSE & NTFS-3G)

sudo mv /usr/local/bin/fuse_wait /usr/local/bin/fuse_wait.original
sudo touch /usr/local/bin/fuse_wait
sudo chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/fuse_wait
sudo chown 0:0 /usr/local/bin/fuse_wait
sudo nano /usr/local/bin/fuse_wait

Copy & paste:

#!/bin/bash

MNTPOINT=$1
shift
TIMEOUT=$1
shift
MNTCMD=$1
shift

$MNTCMD "$@" &> /var/log/ntfsmnt.log
MNTCMD_RETVAL=$?

if [ $MNTCMD_RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
        until [ `/sbin/mount | /usr/bin/grep -c "$MNTPOINT"` -ge 1 ] || [ $TIMEOUT -eq 0 ]
        do
                       sleep 1
                let TIMEOUT--
        done
fi

[ $TIMEOUT -eq 0 ] && RETVAL=1 || RETVAL=$MNTCMD_RETVAL

exit $RETVAL;

Save. Then:

sudo nano /System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs-3g.fs/ntfs-3g.util

Change the following line:

DEFAULT_NTFS_MOUNT_OPTIONS="auto_xattr"

to:

DEFAULT_NTFS_MOUNT_OPTIONS="auto_xattr,noatime,noappledouble,auto_cache"

Save. Reboot. Smile.

For details and alternative methods I wholeheartedly recommend reading through the aforementioned article and thank him, not me.

There are several programs that provide NTFS support. However, I would hesitate to claim that any of these programs can provide 100% compatibility and support.

Here's a subset of the NTFS list in Richard Austin's Blog Champion's discussion of OS X file system choices:

• Tuxera - I've used this program with no issues in Lion and Mountain Lion
• Paragon - site claims to support Mountain Lion, personally haven't used
• OSX Fuse - a freeware successor, don't know if it works with Mountain Lion, personally haven't used

I don't have a retina MBP to test with, but any of these should offer you a good starting point. Since you've already tried Tuxera, Paragon appears to be your best bet, while OSX Fuse would be a good option to try out.