OK,

I'm using RedHat 9 and I just isntalled the NTFS support driver. Now I can mount my NTFS partitions butI can only do that if I'm logged in as root. When go back to my regular account it says I need to be root to access the drive, if I try to change the owner of the drive while I'm root it says that the disk is read-only and it can change any options, including the write permission.

Please help me out.

1- Post your /etc/fstab file.
2- do not enable write access on an NTFS partition, the authors themself say no to do this because it doesn't work well yet, the probability of damaging your files is high.

Here is what I use..

/dev/hda2 /mnt/xp ntfs auto,exec,uid=99,gid=100,users,umask=0222 0 0

People that are in the group users would have access to mount or unmount the partition, and everyone has read access.

If you want you can use another group. group 100 is my users group. uid 99 is nobody. auto mounts it at boot, you can use noauto.

here is what the mount looks like..

dr-xr-xr-x 1 nobody users 12288 Mar 2 03:52 xp

umask=0227 may be best for most people

dr-xr-x--- 1 nobody users 12288 Mar 2 03:52 xp

only the users group will have read access, so you can keep everyone from reading the files. If the system is used by a lot of people I would not allow everyone to access it.

how can i change the umask option to have all the permisions? or do i have no option of writing on that ntfs partition???

CWaidelich

My fstab NTFS line looks like this:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/WinXP ntfs users,ro,umaks=0222 0 0

Voilà!

mine looks like this:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/multy/ ntfs umask=0222,uid=cwaidelich,gid=users 0 0

in my eyes its the same (0222).
Can u rm and mv files ???

I've copied files from NTFS, but you cannot remove them.

Its definatly a BAD idea to try to remove or write files on an NTFS partition.
If you are going to write, make sure the files are the same size.

Best bet - try changing the partition to FAT32 with PQMagic if you have it available.

The newer kernels have a newer module. You should read the help on ntfs write first. It is truly a very bad idea, and is in no way necessary if you can just boot into windows and write files from there.

um guys in kernel 2.6.x NTFS is supported read and write modes both work.


This enables the partial, but safe, write support in the NTFS driver.

The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without
changing the file length. No file or directory creation, deletion or
renaming is possible. Note only non-resident files can be written to
so you may find that some very small files (<500 bytes or so) cannot
be written to.

While we cannot guarantee that it will not damage any data, we have
so far not received a single report where the driver would have
damaged someones data so we assume it is perfectly safe to use.

Note: While write support is safe in this version (a rewrite from
scratch of the NTFS support), it should be noted that the old NTFS
write support, included in Linux 2.5.10 and before (since 1997),
is not safe.

This is currently useful with TopologiLinux. TopologiLinux is run
on top of any DOS/Microsoft Windows system without partitioning your
hard disk. Unlike other Linux distributions TopologiLinux does not
need its own partition. For more information see
<http://topologi-linux.sourceforge.net/>

It is perfectly safe to say N here.

so i have 60 Gb of disk space i can only write on, when im in windows??? give me a break.
i mean, its a lot of space that is not beeing used...

could this work:
delete partion ntsf
create new fat32

but without magic partion...
i know i would have to back up all files on my ntfs...


CWaidelich

"so i have 60 Gb of disk space i can only write on, when im in windows??? give me a break. "

Thats microsoft for you, they designed ntfs specifically to prevent other systems from accessing it. They have gone as far as to make 4 versions (last timne I checked).

deleting the NTFS partition and making a FAT32 partition would absolutely work. Thats what most people do. You would, however, as you said have to back up your data. One note about Fat32 though: you can't have single files bigger than 2GB. For most people this doesn't matter, but if you work with video files, its a big deal.