How to mount partition with ntfs file system and read write access

How to mount partition with ntfs file system and read write access

Article Index
1. Introduction
2. Mount NTFS file system with read only access
2.1. NTFS kernel support
2.2. Identifying partition with NTFS file system
2.3. Mount NTFS partition
3. Mount NTFS file system with read write access
3.1. Install addition software
3.1.1. Fuse Install
3.1.2. ntfs-3g install
3.2. Mount ntfs partition with read write access

1. Introduction

Purpose of this article is to provide to reader step by step guide, how to mount partition with NTFS file system on the Linux operating system. This article consists of two parts:

• mount NTFS file system read only access
• mount NTFS file system with read write access

2. Mount NTFS file system with read only access

2.1. NTFS kernel support

Majority of current Linux distributions supports NTFS file system out of the box. To be more specific, support for NTFS file system is more feature of Linux kernel modules rather than Linux distributions. First verify if we have NTFS modules installed on our system.

ls /lib/modules/2.6.18-5-686/kernel/fs/ | grep ntfs 

 
NTFS module is presented. Let's identify NTFS partition.

2.2. Identifying partition with NTFS file system

One simple way to identify NTFS partition is:

fdisk -l | grep NTFS 

There it is: /dev/sdb1

2.3. Mount NTFS partition

First create a mount point:

mkdir /mnt/ntfs 

Then simply use mount command to mount it:

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ntfs 

Now we can access NTFS partition and its files with read write access.

3. Mount NTFS file system with read write access

Mounting NTFS file system with read write access permissions is a bit more complicated. This involves installation of addition software such as fuse and ntfs-3g. In both cases you probably need to use your package management tool such as yum, apt-get, synaptic etc.. and install it from your standard distribution repository. Check for packages ntfs-3g and fuse. We take the other path which consists of manual compilation and installation fuse and ntfs-3g from source code.