HOWTO: NTFS with read/write support using ntfs-3g (easy method)

[MilesTEG1]

Hello givré,
I made this afternoon the translation.
edit - new url : http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/systeme/ntfs-3g
The old url (http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/ntfs-3g) was no more accessible.


I think the translation is not perfect, but I hope it's correctly done.
If you have time to check it.

Other french users could go there to have the howto in french.

++
Miles

[MilesTEG1]

I have a question.
Let me explain the situation before asking the question.
First, Since I am on gnome (before I was on Kde, but there is no script for mounting/umounting drive like nautilus), I notice that when I connect my external USB hard drive, all of my 2 NTFS partition are mounted when it pluged or turn on.
I can access in readonly mode to the filesysteme on those partitions.

If I right-click on the icon on desktop, and choose mount_with_ntfs-3g, it open me a new windows on the partition mounted. I have read & write access.
I can umount with ntfs-3g script.
Good, ok

But my question is about the first step when I choose to mount with ntfs-3g nautilus scipt. Does it cause some problems ?
Because my parition is already mounted when I use ntfs-3g nautilus scipt. Does your script contain a classical umount for the old ntfs driver ???

All that because you said some trouble with mixing mount / umount method with ntfs and ntfs-g...

Can you light my lantern ?

[yamel]

Okay, this seems a little heavy for a noob, but can I use this to solve the following scenario?:

Playing around with the live cd of dapper and looking at the installation files, something awful has happened making it impossible to boot into Windows. I have finally come to accept that the only way to restore XP is to run the Full System Recovery, losing all of the data, photos, docs, etc.

Can I run all of the above programming to get access to the docs and photos and save them to a cd all from the live cd?

Otherwise, it has been suggested by HP support that I remove the hard drive and attach it to another computer to pull off all of that date before the recovery process. I'm a little scared of that.

Thanks for the advice!
yamel

[MilesTEG1]

To save all of your data, you don't need to have write support on the NTFS partition... Only read is suffisant.
Mount your ntfs partition with classic method, copy your data in your home directory, then burn it on a DVD or CD.

Otherwise, the HP solution isn't so bad, it is a simply way to get your data backuped. It requiert screwdriver and another computer.

[m_pav]

Like thousands of others worldwide, I'm a KDE die-hard and I do not use gnome, so the nautilus script for pluggable drives is not available for kde users unless a huge stack of gnome-specific files are downloaded and installed.

There is one thing that is stopping my full migration to linux - the inability to write to ntfs drives plugged in via usb. I can see your work as the bridge that I need, but without gnome, I'm unable to cross it.

I know I could just go ahead and install gnome, but it would just sit there an use up valuable space as I would never use it.

Mike P

[m94mni]

I just installed this, and while it seems mounting manually works fine, the nautilus scripts end up in:

$HOME/~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/

i.e. a directory named literally '~' is created.

Tis must be a bug in nautilus-script-manager, I suppose.

[m94mni]

I just installed this, and while it seems mounting manually works fine, the nautilus scripts end up in:

$HOME/~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/

i.e. a directory named literally '~' is created.

Tis must be a bug in nautilus-script-manager, I suppose.

It seems /bin/sh does not do tilde expansion after doing variable substitution...

Changing /bin/sh to /bin/bash on line 1 does the trick.

[givré]

Hi guys,

First thanks a lot MilesTEG1 for the frensh howto, it's great , i'll put a link to it.
Now a bit of explanation, about this mount/umount things. Actually, the script use only pmount/pumount (wrapper of the standart mount able to be use by normal user) or mount/umount when it needed (drive in fstab) even if this last case is not yet totaly usefull, i need to implement a last case before the script can mount/umount every ntfs partition. So it use standart tools whithout fancy. On contrary, gnome-volume-manager do things in more complicate way (needed). It use hal device database to know if a new device is plug (it's could be lot's of things), and according to there type, start a specific task. The problem with the eject button, was that for an unknow reason, the device was remove of the hal database before the copy to my usb disk was finish, leading to the corruption of my entire device. I don't know which cause that (hal, gvm,..., i think more about hal), and for the moment i don't have time to go throw it. But even if it's quite sure that this problem could occur for only specific type of usb device (like my usb key), it was enough critical to re add the unmount script.
And i forgot to say, that when i said that plain gvm could work whith my device, in fact i was wrong, an other two test failed, so it's not finaly the crossing method which is in cause, but more the way hal manage this device.
So don't worry, if you use only the script, it will work in any case.
I hope that was your question...

m_pav, don't take that as an offance agin kde user. I was also on a few month ago, and i'll probably be again one in few month, so this not a matter of discrimination, it's more a matter of time. I don't really have time to learn how to add script in konqueror, how the the desktop device link are created in kde, test it, maintain it for each update... The other stuff take me already a lot of time, that i don't really have, in fact for the moment. I plan to go trow that in september, when i'll have more time, but if you don't want to wait, you could try to port it (take the source with apt-get source ntfs-3g-nautilus-tools), i'll be happy to upload it. Thanks

m94mni, whaa funny thing, never heard about that. You should fill a bug, it sounds to be a nautilus-script-manager bug.f the shebang change do the trick it, i guess you are using edgy, and so the script don't work with dash. Fill quickly a bug. This dash things will give us a lot of work

[givré]

And i have the answer of Szaka about pacificske bug :

I've checked the error messages, basically there are two different kind
ones.

One is documented in the ntfs-3g README file which says that this is
not ntfs-3g related and it's just an optimization, chkdsk maintenance.

The other message also isn't related to ntfs-3g because distributed link
tracking isn't supported by ntfs-3g, so it can't cause the problems chkdsk
reported. On the other hand, I've seen similar errors by searching Google
for people who didn't use ntfs-3g because at that time it wasn't released
yet. So the other error seems to be a Windows NTFS problem.

In short, the errors confirm that nts-3g works flowlessly because none
of them was related to it

So nothing to worry about.

[m94mni]

m94mni, whaa funny thing, never heard about that. You should fill a bug, it sounds to be a nautilus-script-manager bug.f the shebang change do the trick it, i guess you are using edgy, and so the script don't work with dash. Fill quickly a bug. This dash things will give us a lot of work

Yes I will, but where do I file it?