3 Internal NTFS Partition

Chapter three is about using ntfs-3g with an internal NTFS drive (e.g. if you are in a dual-boot environment and want to mount your Windows partition under Linux).

3.1 Modify /etc/apt/sources.list

The ntfs-3g packages that we need to install are in an external Ubuntu repository (http://flomertens.keo.in/ubuntu/) therefore we must add deb http://flomertens.keo.in/ubuntu/ edgy main main-all to /etc/apt/sources.list:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

[...]
deb http://flomertens.keo.in/ubuntu/ edgy main main-all
[...]

Afterwards we update our packages database:

sudo apt-get update

3.2 Install ntfs-3g

Next we install ntfs-3g:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

If you see this, please answer with y:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
fuse-utils libfuse2 libntfs-3g0
The following NEW packages will be installed:
fuse-utils libfuse2 libntfs-3g0 ntfs-3g
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 82 not upgraded.
Need to get 226kB of archives.
After unpacking 659kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
libntfs-3g0 ntfs-3g
Install these packages without verification [y/N]? <-- y

3.3 Find Out About Your NTFS Partition

Next we must find out how our NTFS partition is named. Therefore we run

sudo fdisk -l | grep NTFS

The output should look like this:

/dev/sda1               1       48641   390708801    7  HPFS/NTFS

So our NTFS partition is /dev/sda1 in this example.

3.4. Mount The NTFS Partition

Now we can use ntfs-3g to mount our NTFS partition. In this example I want to mount it in the directory /mnt/windows, so we must make sure it exists:

sudo mkdir /mnt/windows

Next we mount our NTFS partition:

sudo ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

(Of course this works only if /dev/sda1 hasn't been mounted before.)

Now open a file browser on your desktop and see if you can access your NTFS drive and save files to it.

3.5 Mount The NTFS Partition At Boot Time

Of course we don't want to mount our NTFS partition manually all the time, but rather have it mounted automatically when the system boots up. To do this, make a backup of /etc/fstab:

sudo cp -pf /etc/fstab /etc/fstab_orig

and then open /etc/fstab:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

and check if there is already an entry for the NTFS partition. If so, modify it, otherwise add a new line like this one:

[...]
/dev/sda1     /mnt/windows     ntfs-3g     defaults,locale=en_US.utf8   0    0
[...]

If you want to use another locale than en_US.utf8, replace it with your preferred locale. You can get a list of all available locales on your system by running

sudo locale -a

The output should be similar to this:

C
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX

After you have modified /etc/fstab, reboot your system:

sudo shutdown -r now

After the reboot, your NTFS partition should have automatically been mounted to /mnt/windows.

4 Links

• NTFS-3G: http://www.ntfs-3g.org
• NTFS-3G on Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=217009
• NTFS-3G on Ubuntu Edgy Eft AMD64: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1647295#post1647295
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com