1. Adobe Reader For Mac
2. Mac Ext4 Support
3. Format Ext4 On Mac
4. Mac Os Ext4

The answer depends on you willingness to invest in commercial software: If you don’t mind spending some money on a commercial product, Paragon’s ExtFS for Mac will give you read and write access to ext2 / ext3 / ext4 file systems. Version 11 supports all versions of OS X / macOS from 10.10 to 10.13. Installing Adobe Acrobat Reader DC is a two-step process. First you download the installation package, and then you install Acrobat Reader DC from that package file.

Is there a safe, stable application for reading from and writing to ext4 file systems on Mac OS X?

If not, what's the best way to access the contents of an ext4 file system on Mac OS X?

10 Answers

The answer depends on you willingness to invest in commercial software:

If you don’t mind spending some money on a commercial product, Paragon’s extFS for Mac will give you read and write access to ext2 / ext3 / ext4 file systems. The current version supports all versions of OS X / macOS from 10.10 upwards.

Adobe Reader For Mac

If you are looking for a free solution, you can setup a Linux virtual machine, mount your volume(s) there and share it / them via Samba or (S)FTP. This post has some details on how to achieve this using VirtualBox, a free virtual machine application. Note this is not exactly a lightweight solution, even if using a prebuilt VirtualBox VM will spare you installing and configuring a Linux distro from scratch.

Building on Ken's answer: I used fuse4x and fuse-ext2 successfully, and I recommend fuse-ext2 over ext4fuse.

ext4fuse was a hassle for me, because it requires manual compilation and has no support for fuse4x options that would allow me to set access control. fuse-ext2 provides downloadable packages, and the 0.0.7 version worked just fine. I copied a few large ISOs over without any problem.

One can also install OSXFUSE completely via the brew command line package manager:

Note that the installation tells certain commands need to be run as 'sudo' in addition to this.

With Yosemite better have a look at this. And then make sure the directory is readable by your user by doing this. For it to work I had to use the wheel group like this:

With recent changes to homebrew, this should be as simple as:

You may have to reboot.

ext4fuse is read-only, unfortunately. And you may need to use a flag to get it to work as a normal user.

Others viewing this question may be interested in libguestfs. I'm not aware of an OS X port, but considering that VirtualBox has an API, it's not out of the question.

I wonder why no one has written a compatibility layer to allow Linux kernel filesystem code to run in userspace/fuse. Or has someone?

If you're wondering what the command line is to mount an ext4 partition using fuse and ext2fuse (e.g. when installed using MacPorts port install ext2fuse) - then firstly you need to work out where the Linux partition is:

This will list all partitions for all disks and amongst them you should see the relevant ones listed under the TYPE column as Linux. Combine the diskX and partition number Y like this /dev/diskXsY - e.g:

It may complain about not being able to write to the log file but it should still mount the partition into your home mount point. But if you want to mount the partition into a system directory then you need to run it as root e.g:

If that doesn't work try:

Update: More recently I've found that fuse-ext2 has problems with certain newer ext4 features, so instead it is better to use ext4fuse (port install ext4fuse or brew install ext4fuse). Use the ext4fuse command directly:

Also as mentioned by Timothy in the comments you usually only need to use sudo if you're mounting outside your home directory or the disk (/dev/diskX) is only accessible by root:

It should be noted that you can only access that mounted filesystem as root/sudo. e.g.

And to unmount the filesystem you just use normal umount command (with sudo if used to mount the partition):

Just for the record, I have tested Paragon ExtFS driver (trial version) on my MacBook Pro to write to ext4 partition in Linux. I found that the driver was very unstable, and it created corruptions to the filesystem that fsck was not able to repair neither in Linux nor in Disk Utility.

My idea was to have access to my /home partition from Mac OS X using this Paragon driver, but I don't suggest to do this setup. So far, I have my /home partition in Linux formatted to hfsplus with no journaling, and then I can access my files from Mac OS X. Of course, from time to time I get some problems in my FS but is not very frequent. However, I don't suggest this setup either (at least that you have an up to date backup for your daily work).

Finally, I believe that Paragon is more suitable maybe to use for external hard disks but anyways it is not very reliable for being software which license is expensive.

Mac Ext4 Support

Update: As of May 2015, I have formatted my /home to ext4, and I mount the filesystem using fuse-ext2 in combination with FUSE for OS X. I can access the ext4 partition to read and write. It is more solid setup than the one I previously described above.

You can boot Linux VM quickly on your OS X using Vagrant. You require to install VM provider such as VirtualBox and Vagrant either via .dmg file from the site or using brew cask.

Once you have vagrant command installed, run this in any selected folder:

^{This will generate Vagrantfile config file and .vagrant folder.}

and you'll have Linux box booted within few minutes (downloaded from Atlas Hashicorp repository).

Then connect to the box via command: vagrant ssh and try to mount your device inside Linux.

By default your current folder will be synched with /vagrant folder in VM. For more advanced options, you can modify Vagrantfile with required configuration.

So if you mount your filesystem within /vagrant folder, it will be automatically synched back to your macOS.

Alternatively you just need to install a VirtualBox, run the GUI app, install and boot a minimal version of Linux e.g. Ubuntu in order to achieve the same as explained above.

Above non-native solution are not ideal, but at least your macOS would be more stable rather than installing unstable kernel extensions which may cause a lot of system crashes.

I had an ext4 formatted USB drive that I was able to mount after I installed osxfuse. Reading from it works great, but I am not sure if writing is safe.

Also, for moving files from OS X's filesystem (HFS+) to ext4, you may first want to remove those hidden .DS_Store files the OS X filesystem sneaks in as they occasionally cause bad inodes.

It is better than having to fix them after with an fsck command.

Updated answer for (High) Sierra

For Sierra and High Sierra ext4fuse seems to work well for read access only and therefore it could probably be considered the preferred option. While other answers already give some usage examples I'll repeat it once again with some important details:

Install ext4fuse with:

You can mount as a normal user but in that case you'll only be able access world-readable files, that's why for full access you need to use sudo, e.g.:

Here is a bash script which partially automates the process. When launched it will automatically create the mount point after you'll be prompted to enter one of the displayed device identifiers such as disk2s1:

To unmount you can use e.g. diskutil umount /dev/disk2s1 — if you get a message that unmounting failed then you can force unmounting with diskutil umount force /dev/disk2s1, although it would be cleaner to close the apps that are using files on the disk and retry unmounting in without force.

If you happen to have files owned by _lpoperator (apparently they are created when you use rsync with preserve group option), then the following command will allow you to access those files:

Original answer for Yosemite and older (deprecated)

Two packages are needed in order to enable EXT2/3/4 support on OSX: OSXFUSE and FUSE-EXT2.

The homebrew formulas for OSXFUSE and FUSE-EXT2 did not work for me on either mavericks or yosemite.

What did work was the following:

1. Manually download and install the OSXFUSE DMG from http://osxfuse.github.io/. IMPORTANT: Once you launch the PKG installer, make sure you selected MacFUSE Compatibility Layer in the wizard (it is not enabled by default) - without it I was getting an error while trying to mount.
2. Manually download FUSE-EXT2 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ext2/ or for Sierra/El Capitan from https://github.com/gpz500/fuse-ext2/releases and run the PKG installer.

Once you have both OSXFUSE and FUSE-EXT2 installed you can mount the ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions as mentioned in other answers:

1. Find the device name for the EXT partition you want to mount (e.g. disk0s2 in the example below, (UPDATE) in later MacOS versions ext3/ext4 partitions might be labelled Microsoft Basic Data and not Linux):

   # diskutil list | grep Linux1: Linux_Swap 8.2 GB disk0s12: Linux 119.9 GB disk0s2

2. Mount the partition to an existing mount point:

   sudo mkdir -p /Volumes/ext4 sudo mount -t fuse-ext2 /dev/disk0s2 /Volumes/ext4

Mounting as a regular user did not work for me. Probably this can be fixed by fiddling with permissions, but I didn't look into it.

Note: My suspicion is that the homebrew formulas did not work because homebrew installs osxfuse without the MacFUSE Compatibility Layer.

There are two osxfuse packages in homebrew:

Both versions fail to mount EXT partitions. Most likely, the DMG version (Caskroom/cask/osxfuse) fails because homebrew installs the package with default settings, which means that MacFUSE Compatibility Layer is not included. The main osxfuse version probably needs some special installation parameter to enable MacFUSE compatibility, so until this is fixed in homebrew the manual DMG method should be used.

Format Ext4 On Mac

This method worked for me on mavericks, yosemite, elcapitan and sierra.

EXT2/3/4 mount script for older OSX versions (deprecated)

To save some extra typing I use a tiny script which takes the partition name such as disk0s2 and mounts it under /Volumes/disk0s2, creating the folder if necessary:

The script is called with the partition name that you look up via diskutil list, e.g. mount_ext4.sh disk2s3.

There is also e2fsprogs available in MacPorts. I haven't tested it yet myself but looks promising.

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READING EXT4 FROM WINDOWS

RECOMMENDED : DiskInternals Linux Readerhttp://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/ freeware application from DiskInternals

Ext2Fsd http://www.ext2fsd.com/

Ext2explore/Ext2Read http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2read/open-sourcejust an .exeonly supports internal HDD devices, for external and removable, get Linux Reader by Diskinternals

extfs http://www.paragon-drivers.com/extfs-windows/ sharewareUnlimited read and write operations (reduced to 5 MB/s after 10 days)there have been anecdotal reports of file system corruptions when writing files to ext4 partitions using Paragonhttps://www.hecticgeek.com/2014/02/extfs-windows-corrupts-ext4-windows-8/

ext4explore https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext4explore/?source=directorydoesn't support EFI partitions

Mac Os Ext4

Partition Guru Free http://www.eassos.com/partitionguru-free.php shareware

READING EXT4 FROM MACOS

RECOMMENDED: OSXFuse, opensource http://osxdaily.com/2014/03/20/mount-ext-linux-file-system-mac/

Paragon extFS https://www.paragon-software.com/ufsdhome/extfs-mac/from https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/210198/mount-ext4-on-el-capitanDon't use Paragon ExtFS for OSX with El Capitan.The port is very experimental despite the fact that Paragon claims support for El Capitan.I've damaged two times a 1.5TB ext4 filesystem beyond irreparable limits, using two independent installations of EL Capitan (10.11.3) on a MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. fsck -y /dev/sda(x) on an linux box after file transfer completed is claiming hundreds of thousands multiply-claimed blocks with several files and directories - filesytem gone!Having experienced some of the same issues described in Schnorch's answer, I can no longer recommend this program.

ext4fuse opensource https://github.com/gerard/ext4fuse