Ubuntu Wiki

THIS PAGE IS OBSOLETE

NTFS read/write with Fuse

These instructions are for Dapper and have not been tested on Breezy or Edgy. However, it should work if you install the fuse library and the ntfsprogs-fuse package.

sudo apt-get install libfuse2 ntfsprogs fuse-utils

As Dapper has already includes support for NTFS & Fuse, enabling should be pretty simple, just follow these steps:

WARNING! Ntfs writing support is still very experimental! You should not enable it on production machines and/or volumes you don't have backups of. Proceed at your own risk!

Enable Fuse Module

bash:~$ sudo modprobe fuse

Mounting a NTFS Device

Make sure to replace /dev/hda1 with the NTFS volume (you can list them using sudo fdisk -l in a terminal) and also change /media/hda1 to your mount point of preference.

bash:~$ sudo ntfsmount /dev/hda1 /media/hda1 -o umask=0007

If you get this error:

fusermount: failed to open /dev/fuse: No such file or directory
fuse_mount failed.

First try , :

modprobe fuse

If the error still occurs, then try:

sudo mknod -m 666 /dev/fuse c 10 229

This command was found here and has worked for some users.

=== Check Mounting===

bash:~$ sudo ls /media/hda1 -l

Try creating a new file in it, for example:

bash:~$ sudo dmesg > /media/hda1/my_dmesg_log.txt

With this, you should have now access to editing, deleting and creating files on the ntfs partition.

==Auto Mount==

To make it automount (or more easily mountable), and also available to users (other than the superuser), follow these steps:

=== Edit Fstab===

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

floppy
nvidia
fuse

Create a Group

bash:~$ sudo addgroup ntfs

The output should look like this:

Adding group `ntfs' (1002)...
Done.

Notice the group GID (the number printed after the group name), we will need it.

=== Add Users===

Add the allowed users to the group (replace username by a real user of the system):

bash:~$ sudo adduser username ntfs

Repeat as necessary.

Edit the Fstab

Edit the /etc/fstab file to mount your ntfs partition. Add a line like this:

/dev/hda1     /media/hda1    ntfs-fuse       auto,gid=1002,umask=0007       0       0

Notice the use of the group's GID, and the umask to allow access just to owner and group.

You could modify it to make one user have read/write access, and a group of users just read access, by defining a user UID and different umask. Example: uid=1001,gid=1002,umask=0027.

If when you run:

sudo mount -a

You get:

mount: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs-fuse'

Then try:

sudo rm /sbin/mount.ntfs-fuse && sudo ln /usr/bin/ntfsmount /sbin/mount.ntfs-fuse

I found this information here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=142481&page=3

Links

More on umask values can be found at this RedHat magazine article.

Information on ntfsmount can be found on it's About ntfsmount page.

v.1.4