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There are several apps (Wine wrappers) which can help executing windows executables on macOS. This is similar to what a VM does.

As we know, we can use a VM to mount, read, and format NTFS drives.

Can we do the same thing with Wine or a similar app? After all, wine contains the important components of the Windows OS.

Edit: It seems some has the view that we should simply consider other ways to use NTFS on mac instead of looking into this approach. This is absurd: what's wrong with doing things in a different way with significant advantage (e.g. less RAM consumption than VM, and also advantage over many other methods)?

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    This is a bit of an XY Problem. See How to format a disk to NTFS using Mac OS X
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Nov 2, 2023 at 16:19
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    @Tetsujin If you think that using Wine is not the right solution, justify your view with clear technical reasons. Do not reject an idea simply because you do not know it. I have clearly justified why this seems reasonable.
    – Ma Joad
    Commented Nov 2, 2023 at 20:55
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    Reading your edit, you didn't actually look at the alternatives. What's the point of re-inventing the wheel, when both free & paid solutions already exist, without needing DIY hacks or a VM. Once you'd managed to format in wine, you'd then still have to find a way to keep that resident, so you could write to NTFS… Mac can't do that natively, only read. The suggested dupe is simply 'How can I enable NTFS read/write/format?" with actual working solutions.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 7:51
  • @Tetsujin Why are you against alternative solutions? That's not reinventing the wheel. It is not the same thing.
    – Ma Joad
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 8:26

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You cannot do this with Wine alone.

Wine does not as such "contain the important components of the Windows OS", rather Wine re-implements some parts of the Windows operating system. In particular, Wine does not contain an implementation of the NTFS file system code - instead Windows file system operations are mapped to POSIX file system operations in macOS.

You could in theory run a third party program under Wine that implements NTFS, and use that program to read and format NTFS drives. It wouldn't really be a practical solution though.

For practical solutions you can look at for example:

  • installing Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software

  • installing the open-source NTFS-3G program

  • installing the open-source ntfstool program

  • running Windows in a virtual machine that allows direct block device access

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