It all starts with the usual story of buying a portable hard drive that is formatted with ntfs. I read a couple things and installed NTFS config which lets me mount the drive(although having to use root password everytime is annoying).
However once I did that anytime I plug in flash stick or connect my phone now it gives permission denied. Which used to auto mount.
So I read some other posts and someone mentioned
sudo ln -s /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g /sbin/mount.ntfs
Which would is suppose to help with the ntfs auto mounting but I get a message stating
ln: creating symbolic link `/sbin/mount.ntfs’: File exists
Obviously I dont know what I am doing and it looks like I created a mess with the fragments of info I tried to pick up.
Does anyone have any suggestions?:\
The link is mount.ntfs Maybe you created it twice or more. So maybe that’s OK. Does the usb drive automount now with read-write access when you plug it in?
ps. Yes I have tried my best to understand that site “How to mount ntfs”. That is where I got the symbolic linking command from. Evidently I don’t understand it enough.
Are you using it with both windows and linux? Many will revert to FAT32 (though it is not ideal as it has limitations and fragments). Or if you only use linux, you don’t need ntfs. Use ext3.
You might have made the mistake of using ntfs-config for a portable drive. Let’s see: can you plug the drive in and then execute these commands and then copy/paste/post the results back here:
cat /etc/fstab | grep ntfs-3g
That should show if NTFS partitions are provided for in fstab
df -Th | grep fuse
That should show if any ntfs partitions are mounted anywhere
sudo /sbin/fdisk -l | grep NTFS
That should show if the operating system is aware of any NTFS partitions
So we will at least know what happens (if anything) when you plug the NTFS drive in.
I do run windoze as a dual boot and I do have ntfs partitions. NTFS is preferable on the portable drive and on top of that the drive wont let me format it with anything but ntfs.
There appears to be a mixup with the “sudo ln …etc etc” thing being at odds with an entry in fstab where a temporary drive has been erroneously configured as permanently attached.
I’m having trouble getting my head around the various partitions that you have. There’s more than I anticipated and some strange results shown by your copy/paste data. Can you please describe how many physical drives you had attached at the time and what NTFS partitions were on each and for each whether it was attached internally or is portable attached by usb. A list something like this:
drive 1: internal drive, permanently attached to motherboard, with ntfs on the first partition
drive 2: etc etc
etc etc
And (with the external drive plugged in) please supply also a full listing from this form of the fdisk command:
The above is false because fdisk shows there is no permanent drive sdc
These two false entries will perhaps/probably confuse the situation for the flash stick and phone and the external NTFS drive.
You should edit the fstab file which is located at /etc/fstab. Just delete the two lines quoted above and BTW there will be a blnak as the last line – leave it that way.
The other entry:
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_WDC_WD740GD-00FWD-WMAKE1168463-part1 /windows/C n tfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.U TF-8 0 0
Is prima facie OK and can be left alone.
You can open the file fstab in a superuser text editor with this command ion KDE:
kdesu kwrite /etc/fstab
or in Gnome:
gnomesu gedit /etc/fstab
EDIT: ps be very careful in fstab – touch only the two lines I mentioned.
Regarding this: “ps. What is that usbfs noauto?”
Well spotted, you should edit the “noauto” to “auto”.
Regarding: “So what do I do now?”
Now that fstab has the two spurious entries for sdc and sdd removed, and once you edit the line for usbfs, you can reboot and see if the new 500Gb NTFS drive will attach and become visible and writeable.
If it doesn’t you will then have to investigate two things:
1: whether the 500Gb drive needs to have its filesystem checked/“cleaned” in windows (chkdsk)
2: whether the links “mount.ntfs” and “mount.ntfs-3g” in /sbin are pointing to the correct targets.
But wait and see if it comes good.
So for now edit “noauto” to “auto”, reboot, attach the 500Gb NTFS drive and see how it goes.
If Linux thinks the USB drive should have its filesystem checked, it will decline to mount it. So I suggest you force a filesystem check. Yiou should have package “ntfsprogs” installed, which you can check with htis console command:
rpm -q ntfsprogs
it should return sort of like: ntfsprogs-1.13.1-80.1
One of the tools in that is “ntfsfix”. First check which device the ntfs usb drive is: run “fdisk -l” without it plugged in and “fdisk -l” with it plugged in. The difference will show you what device it is (probably sdc1). Then run ntfsfix, addressing the device like so:
ntfsfix /dev/sdc1
Then boot into windows with the device attached befor you switch the computer on and windows should run a filesystem check on it.
Then perhaps it will automount in Suse. Tell us whether chkdsk ran in windows? And whether it then mounts in Linux?
If it doesn’t then check the links in /sbin with this command:
I rebooted to windowsXp and the chkdsk did not run. So I went to mycomputer>tools for that drive and tried to run it manually, but it would not run. After the third try it said that it needs exclusive rights to the drive and asked me if I wanted it to check upon next reboot. Which I did and it said it fixed some attributes and other stuff. Once in windows again I turned the drive off and rebooted to suse. Then turned it back on but it gave the same options error
I do have kde 4.1 on suse11 however I stopped using it a while ago as I realized there was a lot of functionality that I was missing. So I only use kde 3.5.9 now.
ps. Does it matter if I have gnome,xfce, and fluxbox installed as well?
Now I don’t understand these things, but I got strange behavior in various things when I had both KDE3.5 and KDE4 installed concurrently. But that disppeared when I woped the install and reinstalled just Gnome and KDE3.5.9. So I found cross contamination from KDE4. But I never had your problem (lucky me). I can’t say with confidence that your manifestation is down to the presence of KDE4, but it sure does look suspicious.
BTW try logging in on Gnome and see if you get the same problem. I say this because I think that it’s a KDE bug (something to do with like kio-slave-helper).