Monday 25 August 2008

Mount NTFS-Formatted USB Disk in Open Suse 10.3

I had a little trouble with mounting an NTFS. When I add this disk and open the file-browser I got a error that it was of a bad format.
For another disk I created a filemount and an entry in the /etc/fstab:
mkdir /Maasland
chown root:users /Maasland
chmod g+w /Maasland

And then in /etc/fstab:
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-ST340083_2A_344E46304B423244-0:0-part1 /Maasland       ntfs-3g    user,users,gid=users 0 0

This way I had to do a mount /Maasland each time I plugged in the disk.

I stumbled upon a similar question on the OpenSuse forums. First there was a tip to do:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /home/user 
But that is basically the same as I did. And you still have to do an explicit mount every time you plug it in.

But there was another tip:
cd /sbin
su -c 'ln -s mount.ntfs-3g mount.ntfs'

And this enables that the disk is "auto mounted" and direct ready for use.
This is so simple and brilliant that I wanted to share it with you. Also to log it for myself for future use (in case I reinstall my laptop for any reasons).

Thanks to "oldcpu" on OpenSuse Forums. I hope you don't mind me sharing this.

Another remark: if you have used the disk with a Windows machine, don't forget to explicitly stop the disk using "savely remove hardware". If you don't, the disk is marked in use by Windows and Linux won't use it. This is (in my opinion) not a bug, Linux does not violoate the access-rights that apparently are set on the disk at attaching it to Windows. Solution is simple: attach the disk to any Windows machine and stop the disk, then attach it to your Linux system.
Apparently Windows is not as strickt as Linux is.

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