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Mount NTFS Drive Manually on Mac

  1. First use diskutil list to list all avaiable disks and identifiy the external hard drive to mount. For example, running diskutil list on my Mac gives me the following output and /dev/disk2s1 is the partition (NTFS) to mount.

    $ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                         500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     314.6 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         500.0 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +500.0 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            102.7 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 45.2 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.0 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      3.2 GB     disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
   1:                      Linux                         1.0 TB     disk2s1

  2. Mount the disk partition. 

    # mount NTFS
sudo mount_ntfs /dev/disk2s1 /path/to/mount/the/disk/partition
# mount a ExFAT volume
sudo mount_exfat /dev/disk2s1 /path/to/mount/the/disk/partition

  3. Umount the external disk if you do not need it any more. You can do this by right click on the icon of the disk and click "Eject" in the pop-up menu. Or you can use the following comamnd to unmount a disk. 

    diskutil unmount /a/mounted/path

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