Notes

Mount NTFS drives in Linux

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System Administration
3 minutes
 1# install ntfs-3g
 2# on Ubuntu 18.04 ntfs-3g is already installed
 3sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y ntfs-3g
 4
 5# create a mount point for the drive ( /home/username/media/EXTRA )
 6mkdir -p ${HOME}/media/EXTRA
 7
 8# identify the NTFS drive
 9# sudo fdisk -l | grep NTFS
10# lsblk -f
11blkid
12
13# mount the drive ( /dev/sdb1 )
14sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 ${HOME}/media/EXTRA

Make it permanent by editing /etc/fstab. Keeping the mount point inside $HOME simplifies permissions

1# identify the UUID of the drive ( 269E88799E8842F3 )
2ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
3
4# edit /etc/fstab
5sudo nano /etc/fstab

UUID=269E88799E8842F3 /home/aamnah/media/EXTRA ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

Run mount -av afterwards to remount your drives.

get a drive’s UUID

1ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 10 12:17 269E88799E8842F3 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 10 12:17 8E8015EA8015D993 -> ../../sda4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 10 12:17 a93aa8af-ff03-417f-8682-44bf488469b5 -> ../../sda5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 10 12:17 c26182a4-a9fa-4534-899b-95f369b0e556 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 10 12:17 C8C0E236C0E22B00 -> ../../sda3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 10 12:17 d6d1e3b5-23a7-4126-b352-ea85c593b13a -> ../../sda6

Where to mount?

  • I prefer cerating the mount point inside $HOME to avoid all the permission issues
  • /media is where the system auto-mounts removable media, for example: CD ROM, USB flash drives etc.
  • /mnt is for manually (and temporarily) mounting filesystems
  • Nautilus shows media mounted in /media in the left sidebar but nothing that has been mounted in /mnt
  • Since both /media and /mnt are owned by root, any mount points (folders created inside it) will also be owned by root. You can either change the folder ownership or you can move the mount point inside your $HOME folder.
  • chown -R $USER:$USER /your/mount/location

Permission issues

I have had scenarios where i was unable to create any files inside the mounted drives. The defaults option includes nouser option, which means only root user can mount the filesystem. This becomes an issue because you will not be able to create any folders inside the mounted filesystem as a non-root user. Any folder created inside /media or /mnt will also be owned by root by default.

Note that defaults and user do NOT change ownership—they only set general mount behavior.

Only FAT/exFAT/NTFS drives support uid, gid, umask etc. options

1# mount an NTFS drive as a specific user
2UUID=122345678912345678 /home/aamnah/media/NAS ntfs-3g defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 2
  • uid=1000,gid=1000 assigns the mount to your user (use id -u/echo $UID and id -g to get your values).
  • dmask=027 sets directory permissions (755 equivalent).
  • fmask=137 sets file permissions (640 equivalent).

If your mount location is inside $HOME and you’re still getting permission issues, it is likely that your mount location is owned by root. While defaults and user options changes mount behavior, they do not change the ownership of the mount location.

1# check ownership of the mount location
2ls -ld /home/aamnah/media/mountpoint
3
4# make current user owner of the mount location
5sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/aamnah/media/mountpoint

Unlike NTFS or FAT32, EXT4 retains file ownership and permissions across mounts. If one partition was formatted or previously used with a different user, it may retain root ownership. I had this happen on a freshly formatted ext4 drive, where the mount point was inside $HOME and i expected it to mount drives as a normal user. Changing ownership of the mount location fixed permissions.

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