Mounting external NTFS HD w/ 10.1

[Guest Psychor]

Hi,

 

I installed Mandrake 10.1 the other night and I was impressed to find that it detected most everything on my laptop. However, there is one problem. I have an external USB NTFS-formatted HD which I use for backup from my XP days and once it is powered on Mandrake placed an icon for it on my desktop. I like this. However, when I click on the icon I get an error message and the directory listing is blank. I believe the issue might be that when Mandrake trys to detect the drive it uses "auto" instead of "ntfs", but this is more or less a total guess as I honestly am still learning a lot about how Linux works. I would type out the error message, but I do not have access to it currently - sorry.

 

I did some experimenting on my own and created a /mnt/usb directory with root permissions and if I type mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb I can pull up the drive w/o an issue.

 

So my question is how can I setup Mandrake with the proper settings so it detects this drive correctly and actually lets me access it when the icon pops up (i.e. not having to mount it manually everytime)? Also, I have read that Linux does not have the greatest NTFS support, so how can I set it so when my external drive is mounted it is READ only?

 

If I left out anything please let me know and thanks for the assistance! :D

 

FSTAB PRIOR TO POWERING EXTERNAL HD

 

/dev/hda1 / ext3 noatime 1 1

none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0

/dev/hda6 /home ext3 noatime 1 2

none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdb,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

 

FSTAB AFTER POWERING ON EXTERNAL HD

 

/dev/hda1 / ext3 noatime 1 1

none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0

/dev/hda6 /home ext3 noatime 1 2

none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdb,fs=udf:iso9660,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

/dev/sda1 /mnt/removable auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,kudzu,codepage=850,noauto,exec,users 0

Edited October 27, 2004 by Psychor

[dickohead]

not too knowledgeable on fstab entries myself... especially in regards to external drives, but i was using 10.1 and it refused to mount local NTFS drives at all - so perhaps you're having the same problem as me...? The kernel does not like them at all! Try recompiling your kernel to a newer version and make sure NTFS support is enabled.... just a suggestion

Edited October 27, 2004 by dickohead

[aRTee]

You will find that if you mount as ntfs that the drive gets mounted read-only. So nothing to do there.

As for automatic detection, I don't think that will work smoothly with ntfs drives.

 

You could try this in your fstab:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/win_usb ntfs umask=0,nls=iso8859-15,noauto,user,ro 0 0

which would have you type only

mount /mnt/win_usb

and lastly you can connect that to an icon on your desktop, so that you can help yourself out with one click (well, you'll need one to unmount the drive too).

 

You may want to check what actually currently happens in /var/log/messages since there you can see which process is called to mount the drive normally - in your case that goes wrong, but you may be able to figure out how to get things right.

 

It may be worthwhile to file a bugreport on this whole thing, you're surely not the only one with an NTFS formatted external drive...

http://qa.mandrakesoft.com

(not so easy to fill out the first time, but worth it if that gets them to fix it)