USB hard drive mounts as "Read Only Filesystem"
 

Hi. I am having a problem with a USB hard drive I just got. Ubuntu 7.04 mounts it automatically, but it mounts as read only. I can't modify the files there. The /etc/mtab file has the following line:

/dev/sdb1 /media/USB_HD ntfs rw,nosuid,nodev,umask=222,utf8 0 0

There is no line in /etc/fstab for the drive. How do I change this so it is not read-only? I want to be able to work on the files in the HD.

Also, it looks like it came formatted as ntfs, since I did not do it myself. Would I be able to write on the drive from Linux with this format? Or I should rather reformat to fat32? (I use it also from Windows). Thanks!!!

Augusto

The issue is that it is formated to NTFS. The kernel does not include (stable) NTFS write support, so it will be mounted as read-only.

If you want to have read/write access to this drive from both Windows and Linux, then reformat it to FAT32. You can do so with a command like:

But FAT32 has a 4 gig file size maximum.

What do you mean stable? I thought the newer Linux installs, like SuSE 10.2, had NTFS support. I really need it, because I want to do images of my linux machine.

Some distributions include ntfs-3g, which is not an official part of the kernel. It generally works, but there is no guarantees that it won't corrupt your drive/files, which is why it has not been adopted for the mainline kernel.

That said, I really don't see why you would want to use either file system for storing images of your Linux machines. What imaging software runs on both Linux and Windows, and what would be the point of opening images of your Linux machine under a Windows environment?

Thanks for your help!!! I formatted it as FAT 32 and it seems to work.

Augusto

Well, I don't want to have to double the number of backup drives I'm using. I'm going to need at least two usb drives, so I can have one always off site. I don't want to have to use 4 drives because Linux can't access NTSC.

Now this would seem to indicate that it's stable:

"The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, and NetBSD. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista file systems. Most POSIX file system operations are supported, with the exception of full file ownership and access right support. "

From:

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

The page you referred lists 85 distributions which include the ntfs-3g driver (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Mandrake, Knoppix, Gentoo, SimplyMEPIS, etc). The driver is very reliable and the developers also guarantee stable operation: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/quality.html
The full driver never be in the kernel because the needed parts are already there for a long time. That part is called FUSE. Ntfs-3g is a hybrid space driver: FUSE is in the kernel and the left in user space.

I'm really not impressed by their own claims that it is stable and free from error, it isn't going to make me use it on any of my important drives. I have had problems with standard "stable" file system drivers before, let alone one that had to be reverse engineered.

Ive wondered about this. I someimes have iso images that are 4gb or bigger and need a filesystem that can handle this size of file. I also just bought a usb hard drive and it came pre-formatted as NTFS. I use mepis which has ntfs-3g but i have had unexplaned events using it on the usb drive. Does the linux ext 3 filessystem have a limit on the size of file in can hold? because i could reformat the usb hard drive to etx3 and then if I ever need to read it in windows i can use an application called "EXT2IFS" that will let windows read the ext3 filesystem.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

Max file size 16GiB – 2TiB


sounds big enough for me :)


I use ext3 on my 60gb external drive, and haven't had any issues :)

However, I dont use windows, so I would test that ext2 driver on your windows box before you go filling this drive with stuff you need and then find out its not gonna cooperate on the windows side.

I don't think its open source unfortunately, but you can learn more about it on the homepage

http://http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

I have used that driver before....

I think ive installed it 3 times, 2 times it worked, the 3rd (and last time) i tried it it didn't. It was probably due to some stupidity with that particular install, but thats why I suggest testing it first, to make sure you aren't going to run into the same problem after you move all your files over to ext3