Ubuntu Tricks - How to mount your Windows partition and make it read/writable with NTFS-3G

The first thing you’re going to have to do is install NTFS-3G. Let’s open up a terminal session and do the following:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

You’ll be prompted to install this and several other dependancies as well. If you run into errors where ntfs-3g can’t be found, check out this article about adding extra repositories.

Now that NTFS-3G is installed, it’s time to tell your box to use it to mount your NTFS partition. Let’s find out where exactly that is. Back in your terminal type

sudo fdisk -l

You should get something that looks like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 2550 20480008+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 2550 7493 39707451+ f W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda3 7494 9729 17960670 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 2550 7394 38911288+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 7395 7493 795186 82 Linux swap / Solaris

We’re interested in the partition that says HPFS/NTFS. Notice that on my machine it’s /dev/sda1. You’ll want to keep track of this for yours. I suggest spelling it out in leftover Halloween candy on your desk, or for a spooky effect, use fake blood.

Now that you have your info on the NTFS partition, let’s edit the fstab file in your /etc directory to use NTFS-3G.

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak

Always make backups of stuff like this. Really.

Many Ubuntu users will find that the fstab already reflects their NTFS drive as mounted in the /media folder. This is standard but does not allow write access, only read access. We’re going to change this to use NTFS-3G. To see what you have do the following:

cat /etc/fstab

If you have a mount point already for your NTFS partition, it will look something like:

/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1

You’ll want to replace the bit that says ntfs with ntfs-3g, so it looks like this:

gksu gedit /etc/fstab

Now add:

/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ntfs-3g defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1

Replace the /dev/sda1 bit with whatever you wrote down from your fdisk -l output and save the file.

If you don’t have this listed at all, you’ll want to create a mount point in your /media folder. If you want to call it ‘windows‘ then you’d make a directory under /media called windows:

sudo mkdir /media/windows

Then add the below line to your /etc/fstab file:

gksu gedit /etc/fstab

Now add:

/dev/sda1 /media/windows ntfs-3g defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1

Finally, restart your machine. Your Windows partition should now be on your desktop, and you can access it through your terminal by going to /media and then cd into the directory your using.

Thanks go to the folks at ntfs.org who have an excellent Wiki on NTFS-3G that you should check out.

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[Source: ArsGeek]