Hi there,

Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 on my dual boot laptop. After the installation, every time I boot the computer I get the following message.

The disk drive for ntfs-3g is not ready yet or not present

Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

What does this mean? How to solve this issue?

At the moment, I am usually pressing 's' to proceed.

Thanks in advance.

Does the UUID for the ntfs partition match what is in /etc/fstab file? To display the UUID's of your partitions, in a konsole run the command This will produce a list of UUID's by partition.

Now run the command and compare the UUID's. Look for the ntfs partition. If the UUID's do not match for the ntfs partition, you can edit the fstab file as root ( sudo ) and make them match.

If everything matches, post the results here of the above commands. For reference, here is what the UUID's on my system look like.

Yours will be different. One UUID is assigned for each partition.

Thank you for quick response.

As I could not interpret the outcomes, I am posting the results here.

srikanth@srikanth-laptop:~$ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda4
UUID=cfb54500-71d6-4d87-8f30-37f9236905b4 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda3
UUID=74113376-e95e-41d7-b23b-8df838a7fc1f none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

# Reading your Windows partition under Linux
/dev/sda1 /media/windows ntfs user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sdb2/media/disk ntfs-3g force 0 0

&

srikanth@srikanth-laptop:~$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-05-10 09:56 61240BB302527AEF -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-05-10 09:56 74113376-e95e-41d7-b23b-8df838a7fc1f -> ../../sda3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-05-10 09:56 cfb54500-71d6-4d87-8f30-37f9236905b4 -> ../../sda4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2010-05-10 09:56 FAFC5F30FC5EE703 -> ../../sda2

Which partition are you having problems with? The first line looks O.K. The second line has several problems.

There has to be a space between /dev/sdb2 and /media/disk. The 'ntfs-g3' should be 'ntfs'. Try 'user,noauto 0 0' for the rest. You have to edit this file as root. Try those changes and let me know...

Commenting the last line in /etc/fstab file did the trick. I remember my laptop having problems detecting the external hard drives and I had to add that line which enabled access to them. This is not the case with Ubuntu 10.04.

Thank you for helping me out!

One doubt here, the output of the two commands above, shows different partitions?

cat /etc/fstab, shows sda1,sda2,sda3 & sda4 partitions whereas

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid, shows sda1,sda3,sda4 & scd0.

Is there something wrong here?

Many thanks!

No, nothing is wrong. Listing the uuid's is just that. There are different ways of identifying a partition. They can both be used. It is now recommended the UUID method is used, since it is more robust. You could move a disk in the hardware, thus changing the sda, to say, sdc, and if you were using UUID's, you would not have to modify your fstab file. If you only used sda1, 2 etc, you would have to edit the file to make the changes.