Using Mountee

Mountee is a menu bar app. It lists every NTFS volume that Disk Arbitration reports and keeps the dangerous action — writing — explicit.

The menu bar window

For each detected volume you will see its name and state:

• not mounted — the volume is visible but not mounted.
• read-only — mounted with writes refused.
• read-write — mounted with write access enabled.

Available actions depend on the state:

State	Actions
Not mounted	Mount Read-Only, Mount Read/Write, Eject
Mounted	Unmount, Eject, Reveal, Details

Reveal opens the mount point in Finder. Details shows the volume information Mountee has collected.

Read-only is the default

Mount Read-Only is the safe choice. It is enough for browsing, copying files off the drive, and recovering data.

Mount Read/Write is a deliberate, per-volume action. Mountee still refuses read/write in these cases:

• The NTFS volume is marked dirty.
• Windows left the volume hibernated (often because Fast Startup is enabled).
• The mount was requested with the read-only option.

When Mountee downgrades a mount to read-only, the reason is logged. The app does not silently ignore the request.

A safe write workflow

1. Back up important data before using any new NTFS driver.
2. Connect the drive and choose Mount Read/Write.
3. Create a small test file, then unmount and remount the volume.
4. Confirm the file is present and unchanged.
5. Proceed with normal work only after the test succeeds.

Eject the volume before unplugging the drive. This is basic filesystem hygiene, not a Mountee-specific step.

Dirty and hibernated volumes

If a write fails with Read-only file system on a volume you mounted read/write:

1. Check whether Windows was shut down cleanly.
2. Boot Windows and disable Fast Startup, or perform a full shutdown rather than a hybrid shutdown.
3. Let Windows complete any pending disk check.
4. Reconnect the drive and try again.

Do not force a read/write mount of a dirty volume. That is how NTFS corruption happens.

Diagnostics

The menu bar window has Copy Diagnostics, which copies a troubleshooting report to the clipboard and saves a copy.

The app binary also exposes the same operations from a terminal. In 0.2.0 the installed app is MacNTFS.app, so the binary path is:

/Applications/MacNTFS.app/Contents/MacOS/MacNTFS --extension-status

Useful commands:

# enabled | disabled | not-registered | unknown
/Applications/MacNTFS.app/Contents/MacOS/MacNTFS --extension-status

# List detected NTFS volumes: device, name, size, mount point, mode
/Applications/MacNTFS.app/Contents/MacOS/MacNTFS --list-volumes

# Write a diagnostics report to a path
/Applications/MacNTFS.app/Contents/MacOS/MacNTFS --diagnostics ~/Desktop/mountee-diagnostics.txt

If the app has been renamed in a future release, use the new binary name. The command-line flags are part of the app, not a separate install.

What Mountee will not do

Mountee never formats, repairs, or erases a volume. It does not check NTFS integrity or fix filesystem errors. Use Windows tools for repair, and keep backups.

See Known limitations for the full list of unsupported operations.