Read and Write External NTFS Drive

[brightspark]

Gents,

Being a newbie I was over the moon when I configured the ntfs-3g driver to read/write to both my internal hard drives so I could swap documents etc that I keep on my windows system (slowly making the transition).

I can't for the life of me though get the same to work for my external usb drive.

I've tried using fstab using the same commands as for the internal drive and it just denys me permission to even read it then.

/dev/sda1 /windows/E ntfs-3g uid=kevin,gid=users,umask=0000,nls=utf8 0 0

This is the line I added to fstab which works with my hard drives (obviously it doesn't read sda1) but not with the usb.

Any suggestions on how i can make this work?

[oldcpu]

I've tried using fstab using the same commands as for the internal drive and it just denys me permission to even read it then.

/dev/sda1 /windows/E ntfs-3g uid=kevin,gid=users,umask=0000,nls=utf8 0 0

This is the line I added to fstab which works with my hard drives (obviously it doesn't read sda1) but not with the usb.

Any suggestions on how i can make this work?

Can you mount the drive with ntfs-3g without using your fstab?

In my case, I used the ntfs-3g driver to read and write from my external maxtor hard drive (formated as NTFS), but first, I booted to MS-Windows, and was very careful to "remove" the drive the proper way in MS-Windows. (This is what blocked me initially - some sort of bug in the linux ntfs-3g driver makes this important - darned if I know why). ... Then I switched OFF the drive, rebooted to linux, and then typed "modprobe fuse". I then switched on the drive, and it was immediately mounted under linux. I had user read access, but no regular user write access to the NTFS.

So I umounted the drive, and then loaded the ntfs-3g driver via:

ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /windows/G -o silent,umask=0,local=en_us.utf8

[brightspark]

Thanks, that works a treat.

I assume (which is dangerous I know) that I can put that line of code into fstab and then everytime I boot the drive will be mounted the same way or is there more to it than that?

Thanks for you help so far. I can now access and save back my documents to the same drive at last.

[oldcpu]

I am somewhat confused as to your configuration. Do you have any internal NTFS formated drives that you have already set up to mount with ntfs-3g (that currently work)? If not, then before your fstab runs, you need to run "fuse" first. .... I don't know what you have done so far in your ntfs-3g setup, so I don't know precisely what advice to give.

Assuming you already have fuse being loaded during your PC's boot (ie fuse executing prior to the fstab being loaded), you could try something like the following additional entry into your fstab:

/dev/sda1   /windows/E   ntfs-3g   silent,umask=0,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0

But I don't know if that will work. SuSE is setup to automatically mount external drives when they are inserted, and I do not know enough (about SuSE) to know if that will cause a problem (ie mounting from both the fstab, and the SuSE "auto mount" features).

I don't use my external ntfs drive very often, and hence in my case, I simply manually type the manual commands I noted in my previous post (and I don't bother with an fstab entry for an external drive).

[brightspark]

Oldcpu,

thanks very much for your help.

I have finally managed with your advise to get my problem sorted.

By adding the line to fstab it works every time.

Cheers.

[oldcpu]

By adding the line to fstab it works every time.

Congratulations on sorting this. And thank you for sharing your solution.

And also, welcome to www.linuxforums.org!!