NTFS

From openSUSE

Support for NTFS in Linux was, for a few years, read only. Recently were introduced drivers that can enable stable read-write access. For more information, please read:

• http://www.ntfs-3g.org The NTFS-3G stable read/write driver project page.
• http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#questions Questions & Answers
• http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ The Linux NTFS project webpage.

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

openSUSE 10.3

The ntfs-3g is installed by default and write support is enabled.

Modify /etc/fstab to reflect umask=0002

For example

SATA or PATA (IDE) drive

#Device    Mountpoint  Filesystem  Parameters
/dev/sda1  /windows/C  ntfs-3g     user,users,gid=users,umask=0002,locale=en_US.UTF-8  0 0

Other options

#Device                 Mountpoint  Filesystem  Parameters
/dev/disk/by-label/win  /windows/C  ntfs-3g     user,users,gid=users,umask=0002,locale=en_US.UTF-8  0 0

openSUSE 10.2

If you need only to see your files, then you don't need to do anything as NTFS read only access is enabled in all versions of SUSE Linux / openSUSE by default.

For read/write you should add this repositories:

 zypper sa http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/filesystems/openSUSE_10.2/ Filesystems

You will see following text:

* Adding repository 'Filesystems'
Repository 'Filesystems' successfully added:
Enabled: Yes
Autorefresh: Yes
URL: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/filesystems/openSUSE_10.2/

Install the following packages:

 fuse
 ntfs-3g

with

zypper in -c Filesystems ntfs-3g fuse

or go to YaST Software Management and install from there. To locate ntfs-3g use that as a search term.

Mounting NTFS Partition

By adding an entry to 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 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:

ntfs-3g -o ro,gid=users,umask=0002 /dev/disk/by-label/windows /mnt

This last part can also be done using:

su -c yast2 disk

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.

When things don't go smoothly

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 a ntfs partitions for more serious work, you should consider using a more appropriate ntfs driver such as ntfs-3g.

If you cannot find ntfs-3g package in the Guru YaST repositories, try searching in suser-jengelh, or download the source from ntfs-3g web site. Make sure fuse is loaded (e.g. modprobe fuse) or if it does not load on startup then add it to the system configuration: Use YaST/System/sysconfig editor; choose System/Kernel/MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT; write fuse in it and click the Finish button.

The build is straightforward (./configure; make; make install). Mount options are very similar with exception of the driver name (ntfs-3g instead of ntfs-fuse).

External HD hotplug bug in openSUSE 11.0

When plugging-in your external hard-drive formatted in NTFS you may get a recurring error saying:

"mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so" 

making it impossible to mount it to the regular KDE user-space. Also, if you try to configure it with the NTFS-3G config GUI it simply creates an entry in fstab, which is useless given the fact we're dealing with a removable hard drive here. NTFS-3G will in fact mount the HD, but you'll be unable to remove it safely without rebooting. A possible solution to this is to mount it manually as root user:

mount /your/device/path /your/device/mountpoint

Another work-around to this issue is to create a symbolic link in /sbin:

cd /sbin
sudo ln -s mount.ntfs-3g mount.ntfs

this way the removable media will be hotplugged directly to KDE user-space. If for any reason you need to get back to the old behavior, simply remove the symlink.

NOTE: this seems to happen only in KDE 3.5 ; not in GNOME or KDE 4

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=385585