NTFS

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NTFS stands for New Technology File System used in some versions of the Windows operating system based on NT, like Windows XP.

Warning

Before proceeding, please carefully read details on the above web pages and make sure that you understand everything. If you are not sure please be careful about proceeding.

Installation of NTFS write support

For openSUSE since version 11.0, ntfs-3g is installed by default and write support is enabled for root only.

By default, only the root user can write on NTFS partition. Modify /etc/fstab to reflect dmask=002 to enable user writing.

For example

SATA or PATA (IDE) drive

#Device    Mountpoint  Filesystem  Parameters
/dev/sda1  /windows/C  ntfs-3g     user,users,gid=users,fmask=113,dmask=002,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

Mounting an NTFS partition

By adding an entry to the file /etc/fstab, the NTFS file system will be mounted automatically at boot. Make sure the mount point directory (in this example /Windows/C) exists beforehand. The most common case is that NTFS is on partition one of the first hard disk:

PATA (IDE) drive

#Device    Mountpoint  Filesystem  Parameters
/dev/hda1  /windows/C  ntfs-3g     user,users,gid=users,umask=0002  0 0

SATA drive

#Device    Mountpoint  Filesystem  Parameters
/dev/sda1  /windows/C  ntfs-3g     user,users,gid=users,umask=0002  0 0

Other options

#Device                 Mountpoint  Filesystem  Parameters
/dev/disk/by-label/win  /windows/C  ntfs-3g     user,users,gid=users,umask=0002  0 0

Make sure there is no “ro” command in the parameters before saving, otherwise the partition will be mounted read-only even though the driver has write support.

Alternatively, you can specify the source device using the disk’s ID (symlinks in /dev/disk/by-id/) or the filesystem’s UUID (/dev/disk/by-uuid/). by-label or by-id are preferred over /dev/sd* nodes because they will remain the same while the disk could show up under, say, /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sda (the latter of which depends on the order they were plugged in and/or recognized).

Manual mount

If you want to mount an NTFS partition manually, use the ntfs-3g command, specifying the disk partition as NTFS. For example this mounts an NTFS partition read-only which has the label “windows” onto the directory /mnt:

This last part can also be done using:

Which is the same as YaST --> System --> Partitioner

For full details on using the ntfs-3g and umount commands to mount and unmount NTFS partition, read their manuals.

Alternative driver

The ntfs-fuse uses ntfsmount and is vastly inferior compared to ntfs-3g; there is a creation limit of 10 files per directory. If you want to use ntfs partitions for more serious work, you should consider using a more appropriate ntfs driver such as ntfs-3g.

External links

• The Linux NTFS project webpage
• NTFS-3G Homepage