By Achilles Hill | Last Updated
“Is NTFS compatible with macOS & Mac OS X?” Some people may ask this question in the reason that the NTFS drive is the most common drive type for Windows users. In general, we can only open and read NTFS drive on Mac. How can we make NTFS drive available to write? And what about the BitLocker encryption NTFS drive? Here we will discuss two solutions to open/read/write NTFS drive on Mac.
For the BitLocker password-protected NTFS (as well as FAT 32 & exFAT) drive, it cannot be accessible even if you have a password. If you want to open, read and write the BitLocker drive, BitLocker Genius can help you. This software is specially designed for Mac users to gain access to the BitLocker encryption drive. However, if you do not have the password or recovery key file, you have to initialize the drive at the cost of losing all data on Mac.
First of all, you need to download and install iSunshare BitLocker Genius on Mac computer. At the same time, it is necessary to make your NTFS drive connected with Mac. You need to make sure that the drive works normally in Windows and it is right connected.
After the software is installed, you can run it and register as the users. At this time, you can see that your BitLocker NTFS drive is labeled with “bitlocker” in the software. Click it and go to hit the Unlock button, you can get the options to make it unlocked.
There are two ways for you to unlock the BitLocker drive. You can either choose the password option or select the recovery file option. Both of them can make your drive appear on Mac Finder. Once you end up the selection, click the Mount button and then your NTFS drive is unlocked. In other words, you can open/read/write the drive on Mac freely at that time.
If the NTFS drive is with no BitLocker protection, you can open and read it on Mac directly just as you are using it in Windows. But for the Write option of the drive, you need to resort to the reliable NTFS reader or using the command line. Here you can have a glance of the command line method.
Step 1: Access Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal
Step 2: Type sudo nano /etc/fstab command to open etc/fstab file in nano text editor.
Step 3: Add LABEL=NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse to nano. The NAME means your NTFS drive name.
Step 4: Press Ctrl + O to save the changes and press Ctrl + X to exit nano.
Step 5: Disconnect the drive and reconnect it, you can find it under “/Volumes” directory. If you want to access it, go to click Finder > Go > Go to Folder and type “/Volumes” into the box.
If you are not confident to handle these command lines, you have better not try this method because only a small mistake will cause loss of all the drive data. So, the easiest and safest way to write an NTFS drive is to take advantage of the third party tool, which you can get many options online.
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