NTFS on a Linux workplace
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NTFS on a Linux workplace

Jurjen Bokma

November 2010

  1. Verify that /mnt/D is not mounted

    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ mount|grep D

  2. See what filesystem would be mounted under /mnt/D

    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ grep D /etc/fstab
    # Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
    # for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
    UUID=30e5610c-0252-4057-8be0-ea5db6812829 none            swap    sw              0       0
    /dev/sda3        /mnt/D  auto    user,noauto  0       0

  3. Create an NTFS filesystem (if not already there)

    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ sudo mkfs.ntfs /dev/sda3
    Cluster size has been automatically set to 4096 bytes.
    Initializing device with zeroes: 100% - Done.
    Creating NTFS volume structures.
    mkntfs completed successfully. Have a nice day.

  4. Mount the filesystem

    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ mount /mnt/D #does not work for the user
    Unprivileged user can not mount NTFS block devices using the external FUSE
    library. Either mount the volume as root, or rebuild NTFS-3G with integrated
    FUSE support and make it setuid root. Please see more information at
    http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#unprivileged
    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ sudo mount /mnt/D #so must mount as root
    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ mount|grep D
    /dev/sda3 on /mnt/D type fuseblk (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)

  5. Use the filesystem

    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ echo blah > /mnt/D/blah.txt
    jurjen@lwp-host:~$ cat !$
    cat /mnt/D/blah.txt
    blah

[Note]Note

It may be useful to remove the noauto option from the /mnt/D entry in /etc/fstab, so the system will mount the filesystem for us.

[Warning]Warning

With the options as used, NTFS files are not handled with UNIX ownership and permissions. I'm not sure whether that is at all possible.

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