09/10/2007

NTFS and the great thing of writing to it...

openSuSE 10.3 uses ntfs-3g and Fuse by default for mounting NTFS volumes, but doesn't allow writing access in the standard installation.

To enable writing access to NTFS partitions, execute

vi /etc/fstab

as superuser and replace in the entries for the appropriate partitions users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022, by defaults but leave the comma and the entry locale=de_DE.UTF-8 right after the comma (without blank) unless you want all the files with umlauts in their names to be hidden from you :-p.

Actually, the only thing you would need to change is the umask, dmask and fmask option as stated in
here (thanks to my beloved Avocadohead).

2 comments:

avocadohead said...

Actually, there seems to be a GUI for the bash-haters out there: ntfs-config, included in the standard distro. However, it seems only to change the driver from ntfs to ntfs-3g and back in /etc/fstab, and not to address the r/w permissions. On the whole, I'd prefer editing the fstab file manually.

avocadohead said...

Rectification: SuSE 10.3 mounts ntfs partitions by default with ntfs-3g, but read-only. To set the permissions with ntfs-config, first disable all write support and enable it again. ntfs-config sets write permissions when changing the driver from ntfs back to ntfs-3g. However, you still might have a problem with special characters in file names if your Windows locale differs from the SuSE one (e.g. en_GB.utf-8 vs. German Windows)