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I did something that has caused my Windows partiton (NTFS) on a dual boot drive to stop mounting automatically in OSX. It used to be on my desktop automagically with each boot. No more. And Disk Utility says it is unable to mount it.

 

The strange thing is that it mounts fine from terminal with:

 

mkdir /Volumes/WINDOWS

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/WINDOWS

 

I get a message that the kext loaded successfully and then I can navigate to the partition in Finder, and as soon as I get to /Volumes, it shows up on the desktop as a drive, as well as being accessible through /Volumes/WINDOWS.

 

Anyone have any suggestions how I might get the automatic behavior back? It almost feels like the NTFS kext used to load on its own at boot and the system could then recognize that the partition was NTFS and then mount it, and now, the kext is not loading until I issue the mount command and the system doesn not know what to make of the partition on its own. If I just give it:

 

sudo mount /dev/disk......

 

it comes back with "Unable to mount - Bad superblock" or something like that.

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Thanks for the suggestion, but Disk Utility cranks at it for 15 seconds and gives up and says I should try to run Repair on the volume. But it will not let me select it for repair because it is NTFS, I assume.

 

Maybe I will try to load the kext and then see if Repair will work. I tried loading the kext and then using Disk Utility to mount the partition, and that was a no-go, but I didn't then try Repair after.

The checksum options sounded promising, Eggman, because this problem seemed to start after I used a new defrag program in Windows that relocated the whole MFT structure, but alas, no joy. I tried a few combinations of checks on and off and nothing will put the mount back at boot or through the Disk Utility. I think the defrag left something non-standard that the system is willing to overlook at the BSD level (so mounting in terminal works) but that it chokes on at the higher OS X level. Linux has no problem mounting this NTFS partition either, although that is basically happening at the command line, like in BSD. CHKDSK in Windows does not find any errors to fix, unfortunately, VaiOSX.

 

When I look at the fstab file on this "Mac", it is basically empty and it says in comments that it is depreciated and should not be used, but I might try it anyway. Nothing to lose. After some sleep though . . . .

I propose you a temporary solution as long as you'll reinstall OS X.

 

1) With the terminal you can add this line at the end of this file /Private/etc/rc.conf (strangely mine has no .conf extension)

 

mount -t ntfs /dev/disk0s1/Volumes/WINDOWS

 

This will mount your Windows partition just before login' in OS X.

 

Tell me if it solved your problem. :)

 

Check here also

Thank you VaiOSX!

 

I looked at the rc file, and the last thing it does is run rc.local if there is one, so I made an rc.local file and put in it both the mkdir command and the mount command, and it works perfectly. The NTFS volume is back on my desktop each time I boot up. I also took a look at the mount_ntfs command from the link you gave, but I am not brave enough to try that. Read-only is safe and really all I need. Now I'm going to boot into Linux and see what I have in the rc.local file there. It has been a while since I set it up and I completely forgot about it until your clever suggestion! Thanks again.

 

And thanks again Eggman for the Disk Utility preferences suggestion -- I never even new they were there. Three months from now sometrhing else odd will happen, and I will remember you mentioning them, and that will end up being the solution to that mystery. Seems like that is how all this stuff works . . . .

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