I recently added two new Macs to my collection, with OSX Lion. As with all of my Macs, one of the first things that I did was to add NTFS read/write support. It was a little different with Lion, so I put together a quick post for anyone else looking to do this.

First, go to http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2010/09/ntfs-3g-for-mac-os-x-201088.html and follow the “NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2010.8.8” link under the “Download” section to get the NTFS-3G files.

Next, open the “ntfs-3g-2010.8.8-macosx.dmg” file that you just downloaded

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Double-click “Install NTFS-3G”. Acknowledge the warning that comes up:

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Select “Continue”:

Select “Continue” to acknowledge the license:

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And then “Agree” to the license statement:

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Then click on “Install” to begin the installation:

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I always select “No Caching” here, as I use mostly USB devices for NTFS and occassionally forget to cleanly unmount them (oops):

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At the end of the installation, click on “Restart” to complete the install:

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Though it always worked well for me in Snow Leopard, NTFS-3G did not work in Lion…so there are a few more steps to complete this. For the time being, ignore these errors:

After the reboot, you will now need to download OSXFuse to replace MacFuse that came with NTFS-3G. To do that, go to http://osxfuse.github.com and click on the download link in the upper right hand corner to get the OSXFUSE-2.3.8.dmg file. Once complete, mount the dmg file:

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From here, click on “Install OSXFUSE 2.3”. The next several steps will look familiar from the NTFS-3G install. Click “Continue”:

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Click “Continue” again to acknowledge the license:

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Click “Agree” to accept the license:

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The first two install options should already be checked. Also check the “MacFUSE Compatibility Layer” box and click on “Continue”:

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Click “Install” one more time to begin the installation:

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OSXFUSE does not ask for a restart like NTFS-3G did, so you should be able to simply click “Close” at the end of the installation.

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You should now see “FUSE for OS X” and “NTFS-3G” in your System Preferences for OSX (on my MacBook Pro, OSXFUSE removed MacFUSE, but it did not on my iMac…odd)

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From here, I was able to mount NTFS volumes as read/write. To be safe, you may want to perform one more restart.

Now, this method worked and I have moved a LOT of data to and from USB mounted NTFS volumes, I do still get this error on occassion:

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However, in each case, the volume actually was mounted. If I have time, I will look into this further and post an update with anything that I find. Until then, I will just continue to ignore the message as it is not accurate.

This was definitely easier to setup in Snow Leopard than in Lion, though both reportedly have full NTFS support present but disabled. Hopefully Apple will enable this support in the native OS soon.