Tink Initialisation

Found this post over here: http://forum.insanelymac.com/. If you have troubles or get it to work please goto that link and post there.

There was also mention of iMountit which is an app that when is run pops up a menu showing mounted drives. But the easiest way to mount an ntfs drive as read/write is to drag the drive onto the iMountit app.

Note, ntfs3g drives show up with network icons, apparently this is normal, but sucky.

The first post is:

I’ve read a lot of info on the web about ntfs-3g in Mac OS X, but didn’t find a guide that would be complete, so I decided to write one with all the experience I’ve got now. My guide is rather fool-proof, but it involves messing with /sbin system directory, so remember, you’re doing it at your own risk.

Big thanx to danielj7 and asstolavista from ntfs-3g forum for information. Without them, this won’t be possible.

The Guide
1. Download and install MacFuse package, and REBOOT.
2. Download and install NTFS-3g package
3. Run TextEdit from /Applications Folder
4. Go to Format->Make Plain Text
5. Paste in the following:

#!/bin/sh

VOLNAME=${2%/}
VOLNAME=${VOLNAME##*/}
OPTS=”-o default_permissions -o locale=ru_RU -o volname=$VOLNAME”

/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g $@ $OPTS

6. Go to File->Save as
7. Uncheck “If no extension is provided, use .txt”
8. Type in the following file name: mount_ntfs and save the file to Desktop
9. Run Terminal from /Applications/Utilities Folder
10. Type cd ~/Desktop
11. Type chmod +x mount_ntfs
12. Type sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.old
13. Type in your password when requested and press Enter
14. Type sudo cp mount_ntfs /sbin
15. Type sudo chown root:wheel /sbin/mount_ntfs
16. Type sudo chmod 555 /sbin/mount_ntfs
17. Reboot

After reboot, your NTFS drives should be mounted with read/write permissions automatically.
If you unmount and remount drives through Disc Utility, or plug in additional NTFS drives, they will be mounted with read/write permissions also.

Additional info for bilingual users
If you have files with names in languages, other then english, on your NTFS drives, they won’t be shown by default. To see such files, you must slightly edit the mount_ntfs file during step 5.

#!/bin/sh
VOLNAME=${2%/}
VOLNAME=${VOLNAME##*/}
OPTS=”-o default_permissions -o locale=ru_RU -o volname=$VOLNAME”
/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g $@ $OPTS

With RED color, I highlited the locale section, where you can change your locale. I, myself, have files with names in Russian, so I use ru_RU locale to see these files.

To see a list of locales, installed in your system, open Terminal and type locale -a.

There is a chance, that after the folders with names in other languages appear, you won’t be able to open files from them. In that case, just rename the folder once, and rename it back. Mac OS X will write the folder name in correct encoding and all files will open after this.

Restoring default NTFS mounter
In case anything went wrong, just run Terminal, type sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs.old /sbin/mount_ntfs and enter your password.

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