NTFS drives are booted as read-only

Hello,

I have dual booted openSUSE Tumbleweed with my Windows 11 system.
Both OS is installed in the same SSD but in separate drives. I created a new partition for Tumbleweed alone. I used Ext4 instead of btrfs as I don’t need snapshots at the moment.
My Windows’s C drive, another drive where I have games and another SATA HDD that I have connected to my PC are in NTFS formats.
Tumbleweed wasn’t auto mounting them, asking for passwords when every time I logged in. I checked Partition Manager section of YaST and saw that after manually mounting with admin password they were mounted as, “/run/media/serioushoax/LiTtLeBoY”,“/run/media/serioushoax/BiGbOy”, “/run/media/serioushoax/FaTbOy”. Those are the name of my Windows drives.
So, I restarted the PC, and manually put these lines in YaST partition manager and that made them auto-mount ever time.
I though nice, problem solved, YaST is amazing (it is definitely) but then I realized they are read-only. I can not write or modify anything.
BTW, fast-startup/hibernation is turned off in my Windows 11. I don’t use thar feature anyway. Besides, as I said even my HDD is also mounted as read-only.
Can anyone please help me with this? What can I do to have write permission? This is vital for me.
I’m relatively a newbie in the Linux world. I have some basic knowledge but it’s barely anything. So, I would probably be able to fix it if you can guide me how.
I would really appreciate the help.

Thanks.

I did not read your post complete, but from your title you seem to experience that NTFS file systems are mounted read-only.

That could be the result from they not being properly removed from the Windows system they were used on before you switched them to the openSUSE system.

Either see that you properly remove them, or check that “fast boot” (or something named like that) is switched off in Windows. Because that is not really a proper shutdown of Windows and the NTFS file systems are then in the wrong state.

Hi! The windows feature is called Fast Startup and it is disabled. I never used that feature on my Windows, always disabled that after installing Windows.
How to know if the drives are properly removed? Is there anything else you can suggest?

Checking the logs.

BTW, you mentioned “booted” instead of “mounted”.
Can we come to the conclusion that the mount is during boot and thus that they are configured in /etc/fstab? When yes, the please show the conetns of /etc/fstab

Oh and one more thiing. We always like to see what the computer says. Thus when you say “mounted read-ony” , please show that with

mount

Here is my fstab:


Should I change the fmask=133,dmask=022 value to something else?

First a forums technical remark.
We do not like images when they are not really needed. Difficult to read, impossible to use browser search functions on them, impossible to select parts of them for quoting.

What we do like is copied/pasted texts from a terminal emulator (like konsole, or xterm or the like), and the paste as Preformatted text: Posting code or preformatted text - Using Discourse - Discourse Meta

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Then back to your problem.

I also asked for the output of

mount

which is still missing.

In fact I am still trying to understand what you mean with “NTFS drives are booted as read-only”. Because that is a conclusion of yours but not why you think this is so. We need the facts, not the conclusions.

In general there are two possibilities

  1. the file system is mounted read-only, in which case we should investigate why. And that is why I asked if they are properly removed from Windows. And that is also why I asked to show if they are mounted read-only.
  2. One or more users are unable to write to files on the file system and/or create new files on the file system. Then that probably is a case of ownership and permissions (as is true on every directory/file in a Unix/Linux system).

Now we have seen your /etc/fstab, we know they are mounted at boot and we can also see what (faked) ownership and permissions will be used for the directories and files on the file system.

Because you do not mention a specific user, all files there will be owned by user root.
Because of the fmask and dmask options, the permissions of files will be set to rw-r--r-- and those of directories will be set to rwxr-xr-x. I assume that you understand what this means.
So if it is a user that complains about being unable to write, that is correct.

That depends on what you want. You are the system manager.
If root is to be the owner and all users should be able to write there, you should change the fmask= and dmask= accordingly.
If only a specific user has to have access to the data on those file systems, you should change the owner/group with the uid= and gid= options (and can then leave the fmask= and dmask= as they are, and please pay attention that the user him/herself can not change permissions to his/her liking as he/she can do elsewhere, because on NTFS this is impossible).

BUT, my advice in both cases would be NOT to use mount point inside /run. That is typical a place for the system to manage things and the system manager should not poke around there.
There are by far more logical places to be used as mount points. And when one runs really out of imagination, then there is /mnt specially created for it.

Examples.
When these data are for a specific user only, one could mount them inside that user’s home directory. May however in this case prefer mountpoints like /mnt/bigboy and then let the user create a symbolic link from within a place in his home directory. E.g.

ln -s /mnt/bigboy /home/serioushoax/windowsdata/smallboy

(sorry for the puns).

Long story, I hope it helps. Yes, Linux has a steep learning curve. You can of course come back for more questions clarification, etc. But please show what I asked for and try to find out what your goal with those file systems is.

Sorry about not providing all the adequate info in my previous comment.
But now the thing is, after my last comment I performed an update by “sudo zypper dup”. It installed the new 6.10.8 kernel I think from 6.10.7 and also updated a few other things. It recommended a system restart, which I did and now Tumbleweed won’t boot. It shows,

[ 4.385143][ T388] amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: Secure display: Generic Failure
[ 4.385152][ T388] amdgpu 0000:0a:00.0: amdgpu: SECUREDDISPLAY: query secured
display TA failed. ret 0x0

So, I have a bigger problem right now. Since I went for “ext4” mainly because of lack of space, so no “btrfs snapshot” to restore for me.
My PC is a system with AMD 3400G which has integrated Vega GPU. Don’t have anything external.

You better start a new thread for this, because nobody will detect this boot problem from a thread with the title this one has.

In your /etc/fstab you are using the driver ntfs to mount your NTFS file system.

As far as I know there are 3 drivers available to handle NTFS file systems:

ntfs
as far as I know allows read access only (ro)

ntfs3
allows read-/write access (rw) but there were rumors that it might cause problems (?)

ntfs-3g
allows read-/write access (rw)

I’m not sure whether ntfs-3g is installed by default. You can install it with

zypper in ntfs-3g

@hcvv You’re right. I will do it. I just shared here to let you know why I may not be able to reply on this at the moment.
@susejunky thanks for your suggestion. I will check that once I’m able to boot into the OS again. I will create a new thread regarding that issue.

Yes, thanks for letting the people here know. Success with your recovering.

The current TW kernel provides the ntfs3 module and that is likely used when “mount -t ntfs” is specified on fstab.
ntfs-3g should be already installed by the default install, but must be specified as “-t ntfs-3g” on fstab to be used. It provides specific options for user permissions etc., see “man ntfs-3g” for details.

BTW, I doubt that it matters much in this case what is used:

  • the file systems are mounted;
  • reading seems to be possible;
  • writing, not, but that is explained by the ownership/permission combination provided by the default (for the owner) and the options set (for the permissions).

So, while alternatives are available, I do not see what their influence will be on the problem and it’s solution.

1 Like

That is correct but according to this openSUSE Wiki article ntfs3 is on the list of unsupported file systems and on my system

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240906
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.5.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.10.8-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 630

there is a file /lib/modprobe.d/60-blacklist_fs-ntfs3.conf.

And I might be wrong but (at least somewhere in the past) the ntfs kernel driver only allowed for reading files but never for writing.

As far as I know there is no need for “-t” in order to specify a file system type in /etc/fstab.

On the mount statement it is -t <fstype> in the fstab it is the third field of the entry that is <fstype>.

I assume that @OrsoBruno only uses this a s a common shortcut :wink:

Not willing to hijack the thread or go off topic, but a quick test of

mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt

on a pretty standard (AFAIK) TW install yields the following:
. superuser privileges are needed
. mounting is performed via ntfs-3g and the external FUSE library
. files have owner=root and group=root but anybody has read/write permissions
. the ntfs3 kernel module is not loaded (as per default blacklist).

So the problem originally reported seems indeed only related to the fmask=133,dmask=022
options used in the edited fstab.

I hope that does not come as a surprise to anybody.

No, no surprise at all BUT that

mount -t ntfs /dev/xxx /mnt

mounts a NTFS file system using a fuse file system driver is a surprise.

The only fuse NTFS file system driver I’m aware of is ntfs-3g.

What fuse NTFS file system driver is used with the command above? If it is ntfs-3g why is it called ntfs and where is that alias defined?

Just guessing.

NTFS is of course the shortened indication of that type of file system and is used in the form ntfs in Unix/Linux with mounts. The module that handles this in the kernel can of course have any name as long as the kernel uses it with a file system of type ntfs. It is of course logical to call such a piece of software also ntfs, but when newer versions arrive, need for a different name from the human point of view might be needed. Often you see something like adding a 2, but anything is possible and one probably chooses a name logical to those involved.