Ubuntu Wiki

• Create a mount point (directory) from where the parition will be accessed. Default for Ubuntu is to create all filesystem mount points in the /media directory.

  mkdir /media/partitionname

• Mount the right partition to this mount point. Partitions are all found under /dev, and are labeled hd (common harddisk) or sd (SCSI or SATA harddisk) plus a, b, etc for the physical harddisk number, plus 1, 2, etc for the partition-number. On a multiboot system, the Windows C-partition can commonly found as /dev/hda1.

  • FAT partitions can be mounted with

    sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/partitionname -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8,umask=000

  • NTFS partitions can be mounted with

    sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/partitionname -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222

    Note that you can only read from NTFS partitions, not write to them.

• To automatically mount partitions at boot-up, edit the file /etc/fstab and add the following line for each FAT partition:

  /dev/hda1       /media/partitionname  vfat    iocharset=utf8,umask=000   0       0

  or for NTFS partitions:

  /dev/hda1       /media/partitionname  ntfs    nls=utf8,umask=0222 0       0

• Two additional parameters for vfat partitions, that you will not often see suggested, are "shortname=mixed" and "uid=1000,gid=1000". The first will take care that all-caps short filenames show up in all-caps instead of in small characters. The second will take care that you are the owner of all files on the vfat partition, this will allow you to maintain file modification date/time when copying files to the vfat partition.

• As superuser, enter

  mount -a

  to (re)mount all the partitions.

CategoryDocumentation CategoryCleanup