Sunday, January 1, 2012

Re: Can't write to ntfs file system


On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Graham Lawrence <gl00637@gmail.com> wrote:
I have an external hard drive that is in ntfs file format.  Vim will
neither create a file, nor write to existing files, on this file
system.  It returns E212, saying I do not have permission.

The drive mounts automatically from my fstab entry when I start the system

   /dev/sdb1        /media/500gb     ntfs-3g     rw,user,auto     0   0

and mount shows it as

   /dev/sdb1 on /media/500gb type fuseblk
(rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096)

so its permissions and ownerships are universally, e.g.

   /media/500gb/Films/Mouchette (1967) (French with English Subtitles) $ls -l
   total 4
   drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 Jan  1 08:50 VIDEO_TS/
   -rwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Jan  1 10:40 mplog*

I'm not an expert, but I've always managed to get things like this working.  I had some problems originally with my NTFS partitions, although I don't remember the details.  I think it may have had to do with the owner, rather than the permissions, but there must be more to it, since it appears that everyone should be able to write to it. But things aren't always what they appear to be.  :)

I had to change my mount to something much more complex than the default.  Mine now looks like this on my Ubuntu system; I'm using UUIDs instead of device names.

UUID=##big number##    /media/subdirectory   ntfs  auto,users,uid=username,gid=username,utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137  0   0

Pardon me if this is too elementary, but I'd recommend unmounting the device, editing fstab (and saving, of course), then entering "mount -a" in a terminal to test.  Modify if needed, then repeat until it works or you give up.  At least, that's my usual procedure.

Hope this helps, and hope nobody minds the off-topic discussion.

Good luck...
--
Marty Fried

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