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

[MilesTEG1]

Do you guys have the drive without a manual power switch? Another person on the previous pages has the same problem. My drive has a manual switch on the back of the ext drive and I manually turn it off after I'm finished with the drive. The drawback in Linux is, it kills my USB wlan dongle and I have to manually restart networking in order to connect to the network again. This anomaly does not happen in OS X or Windows.

indeed, my external hard drive has a manual power switch, on the front.

[minority]

I am having issues with the:
"sudo apt-get install ntfs-3" command it keeps throwing me an error saying "Couldn't find package ntfs-3g"

I also tried the "sudo fdisk -l | grep NTFS" and get nothing.

The drive has always shown up in the file browser I just can access it all all it just tell me unable to mount.

[givré]

I am having issues with the:
"sudo apt-get install ntfs-3" command it keeps throwing me an error saying "Couldn't find package ntfs-3g"

I also tried the "sudo fdisk -l | grep NTFS" and get nothing.

The drive has always shown up in the file browser I just can access it all all it just tell me unable to mount.

Hi minority,
Could you post the result of

sudo fdisk -l

here please.
Also, there is no amd64 package in my repo for the moment. Is's probably the reason if you install the 64 bit version.
Note that 64bit is not supported by the author of ntfs-3g because he couldn't test it on this arch. But some people report success, so you can try to compile them from source.

[minority]

I am actually have it installed on an old G3 powermac. Will it not work on it?

/dev/hdc
        #                    type name                 length   base     ( size )  system
/dev/hdc1     Apple_partition_map Apple                    63 @ 1        ( 31.5k)  Partition map
/dev/hdc2         Apple_Bootstrap untitled               1954 @ 64       (977.0k)  NewWorld bootblock
/dev/hdc3         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled           12062501 @ 2018     (  5.8G)  Linux native
/dev/hdc4         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap                 591929 @ 12064519 (289.0M)  Linux swap

Block size=512, Number of Blocks=12656448
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
Drivers-
1: @ 64 for 21, type=0x701
2: @ 118 for 34, type=0xf8ff

[givré]

I think this will not work. I red some things about
big endian problem with ntfs-3g, so you should not try it
until it is solve (if it is one day).
But i might be wrong. You should ask that in the forum or in the
user mailling list of www.linux-ntfs.org, i think it's the best place
for that.

[bullgr]

thanks, it works perfect...
this solve many problems switching from winblows to ubuntu

good work...

a silly question: how can i remove the disk icon from the desktop?
but not the other mounted disk icons (like usb disks)... only the one created from the ntfs-3g howto

[givré]

gconf-editor

and search in apps>nautilus>desktop or something like that, it should be there.
If not, search for 'desktop'.
But try to read at least the last post, i just answer this question a few hour ago

[bluntu]

I have a 65MB USB (Fat32) and I tried to write a text file onto it then I took out my USB and then put it back in and the size of the file is 0 byte.

Now, intead of pulling it out first, what I do is right-click and "EJECT" then pull it out physicall. My question is: Why do I have to right-click eject everytime I want the data to be 100% written to the USB?

I'm just curious.

[givré]

Because usb key are mounted with the noatime option

Linux has a special mount option for file systems called noatime that can be added to each line that addresses one file system in the /etc/fstab file. If a file system has been mounted with this option, reading accesses to the file system will no longer result in an update to the atime information associated with the file like we have explained above. The importance of the noatime setting is that it eliminates the need by the system to make writes to the file system for files which are simply being read. Since writes can be somewhat expensive, this can result in measurable performance gains. Note that the write time information to a file will continue to be updated anytime the file is written to. In our example below, we will set the noatime option to our /chroot file system.

But because all information couldn't be transfer when in use, it will finish the job when it unmount the device (ie when you eject the device). It's why it could take so much time sometimes
Anyway, in general, it's highly recommanded to unmount device at the end of use.

[MilesTEG1]

Hello givré,
have you ny trouble with your second repository ?
Because I have some. It canot access it (synaptic or apt-get)