NTFS-3G Will Not Mount FAT32 DMG Images

I have an external hard drive which is formatted NTFS. Just one of the many hazards of using a Mac is that they do not support NTFS, which is a far superior filesystem to FAT32. Fortunately, there is a program called MacFuse which allows you to use many different things as filesystems, including SSH. Someone at Google wrote a read/write NTFS driver, known as NTFS-3G, which works with MacFuse to allow read/write mounting of NTFS volumes. Exactly what I wanted, so I downloaded and installed MacFuse and NTFS-3G, taking care to get the latest stable versions.

Unfortunately, I also needed to copy files from a DMG image. After installing NTFS-3G (which forced a restart – it’s a myth that installing things does not require rebooting on a Mac) the DMG image would no longer mount, giving me a Permission Error and sending me on a wild goose chase, with commands to elevate permissions for ntfs-3g, none of which helped one bit.

It was the dreaded “ntfs-3g could not mount because the following problem occurred: permission denied” error, because apparently ntfs-3g doesn’t work with FAT32 volumes. Dumb. You get NTFS but lose backwards compatibility. I also encountered a “no mountable file systems” error.

I searched in vain for some way to get this to work, or some way to uninstall ntfs-3g. There are ways to do that, but they don’t appear to be easy. Until I read one comment on Google Groups:

After manually removing the folder /System/Library/Filesystems/
NTFS-3G.fs it worked.

That’s the way to do it. Manually remove the directory and MacOS will take over and mount the DMG file properly.