Restore Permissions to external HDD

To read/write NTFS (Windows-formatted) external HDDs on my Mac, I have installed *FUSE for OS X * (version 3.2.0) and *NTFS-3G* (version 2015.3.14, installed with homebrew and the instructions from NTFS-3G ). I have selected the 'MacFUSE compatibility layer' because it is required by *veraCrypt* (from https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/). Copying to/from the Mac to the NTFS HDDs works as expected. However, I can no longer use the Disk Utility's "First Aid" utilities (to correct permissions, to correct errors when the HDDs get incorrectly dismounted). The disk utility options are now 'greyed out' for my HDDs. These options are still available for my internal SSD and for my SD card, so the disk utility is not 'broken'. The HDDs are also fine: they work correctly and I can still fix them on Windows. The problem (the only one I can see so far) is that I can no longer fix my external HDDs with the Mac's disk utility. I'm currently on `OSX Yosemite`. Here is the diagnosis from the Disk Utility: Name : PatrickA Type : Partition Disk Identifier : disk2s1 Mount Point : /Volumes/PatrickA File System : Windows NT File System (NTFS) Connection Bus : USB Device Tree : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/XHC1@14 Writable : Yes Universal Unique Identifier : 54D2798C-E724-4810-B621-F1358C19DC48 Capacity : 1 TB (1,000,169,537,536 Bytes) Free Space : 245.04 GB (245,044,764,672 Bytes) Used : 755.12 GB (755,124,768,768 Bytes) Number of Files : 130,742 Number of Folders : 0 Owners Enabled : Yes Can Turn Owners Off : No Can Repair Permissions : No Can Be Verified : No Can Be Repaired : No Can Be Formatted : No Bootable : No Supports Journaling : No Journaled : No Disk Number : 2 Partition Number : 1 As you can see above, my HDDs (all of them) can no longer be verified or repaired. I was always able to do that before reinstalling FUSE and NTFS-3G. The above diagnosis is identical for all 12 of my HDDs. I tried to reset permissions, but was denied: vsdbutil -a /Volumes/PatrickA vsdbutil: no valid volume UUID found on '/Volumes/PatrickA': permissions are disabled. I read somewhere that hfs.util can regenerate a UUID, but that didn't work. diskutil info /Volumes/PatrickA | grep "Device Identifier" Device Identifier: disk3s1 /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -s disk3s1 Any suggestions? Thanks! **UPDATE** I came across suggestions on how to use the diskutil from the command line. Here is the error message I get: diskutil verifyvolume /Volumes/PatrickA/ Error starting file system verification for disk2s1 PatrickA: Invalid request (-69886) I have also not been able to get smartctl to do anything useful with the volume: smartctl -c /Volumes/PatrickA smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [x86_64-apple-darwin14.3.0] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org Smartctl open device: /Volumes/PatrickA failed: I came across a suggestion that a third party driver is needed to diagnose external drives on a Mac OS X (I do not know if this is generally true). The *SAT SMART driver* (available at https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver) extends the standard driver behaviour by providing access to drive SMART data. I was successful in changing the SMART status of my HDD to "Verified." But this does not appear to have helped much as the errors reported above still appear.