copy/move files from /home to /windows/media in Nautilus

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1

Hello there,

I am done with a dual-boot installation. I’d like to transfer file between linux and windows in Nautilus file browser.

Here my partitionm-system:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6              20G  7.2G   12G  39% /
udev                  2.0G  204K  2.0G   1% /dev
/dev/sda7              72G  456M   68G   1% /home
/dev/sda2              59G   32G   28G  53% /windows/C
/dev/sda3             108G   87G   22G  81% /windows/D

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0201ff32

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1306    10485760   27  Unknown
/dev/sda2            1306        9139    62918572    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           31038       45398   115346700    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4   *       48417       60801    99482512+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           48417       48678     2104483+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           48679       51289    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           51290       60801    76405108+  83  Linux

problem:

in Nautilus file browser I cannot move files from /home to /windows/media/D. I have to be root and do this from a gnome terminal, even after “chmod a+w /windows/media/D” as root.

Why?

2

errata, the command I tried was “chmod -R a+w /windows/D”. But the problem is still there.

/windows/D # ls -l
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users 4096 2009-11-25 19:56 MOVIES
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users 4096 2009-11-23 22:32 PhD
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users    0 2009-12-08 19:30 PICs
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users 4096 2009-12-11 13:54 P&U
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users    0 2009-11-11 04:25 $RECYCLE.BIN
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users 4096 2009-11-11 15:42 SIM HT
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users    0 2009-11-11 04:23 System Volume Information
drwxr-xr-x 1 root users    0 2009-11-25 19:59 Videos
3

IIRC you have to adjust the mount options so that the files are owned by you. I’m sure somebody with more experience with mounting NTFS will pipe in with the appropriate incantations soon.

4

The files are restricted by the options selected in the mounting line in fstab. Currently there’s a line like this in fstab controlling the access:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_etc_etc-part1 /windows/C           ntfs-3g    users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

and you need to change it to like this:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_etc_etc-part1 /windows/C           ntfs-3g    defaults 0 0

You can’t chmod or chown it, you have to edit the line for /windows/D similar to the above.

See here: HowTo Mount NTFS Filesystem Partition Read Write Access in openSUSE 10, 11

If still puzzled, run this command:

cat /etc/fstab | grep ntfs
and post the results here

5

great! It works (I only need to set w permission on D).
Thanks!
Alex

6

Be aware that the “write” NTFS ability comes with caveats. I once tried to run a VMWare machine that was on an NTFS partition and let’s just say you don’t want to do that.