Why is FAT16 limited to read-only with TrueCrypt on Snow Leopard

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.

It turned out that this was related to running a true 64-bit kernel instead of a 32/64-bit one.

Installing one of the following updates for the FuseFS system fixed the error:

• Fuse for OSX: http://osxfuse.github.com/
• MacFuse 2.2.2: http://mac.majorgeeks.com/files/details/macfuse.html

After installing this, I reopened TrueCrypt and was then able to mount the volume.