How To Enable NTFS Write Support (ntfs-3g) On Ubuntu Feisty

Fawn
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>

Normally Linux systems can only read from Windows NTFS partitions, but not write to them which can
be very annoying if you have to work with Linux and Windows systems. This is where ntfs-3g comes into
play. ntfs-3g is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support. This
tutorial shows how to install and use ntfs-3g on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn desktop to read from and write to
Windows NTFS drives and partitions.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting
up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any
guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I have tried this on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn desktop with an external NTFS USB hard drive.

2 Installing ntfs-3g

Open the Synaptic Package Manager (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager):

You might have to type in your password to be granted access to Synaptic.

After the Synaptic Package Manager has started, click on the Search button and search for ntfs:
On the results page, click on the package ntfs-3g and select Mark for Installation:

ntfs-3g has some required dependencies that must be installed as well; accept these packages by clicking
on Mark.
Then mark ntfs-config for installation as well:

Click on the Apply button to install the selected packages:

Confirm your selection by clicking on Apply again:

The packages are being downloaded and installed:

Afterwards, you can close the Synaptic Package Manager:
3 Using ntfs-3g

Before you plug in and switch on your NTFS drive, open the NTFS Configuration Tool (Applications >
System Tools > NTFS Configuration Tool):

In the NTFS Configuration Tool, you can specify for what NTFS drives you want to enable write support.
I'm using an external NTFS drive, so I select Enable write support for external device (my system doesn't
have any internal NTFS devices, so the other option is greyed out). Then click on OK:
Now while you're sitting in front of your Ubuntu Feisty Fawn desktop, plug in your external NTFS drive
and switch it on.

After a few seconds (if nothing goes wrong), you should see a desktop icon for your NTFS drive (mine is
called BACKUP), and a file explorer window should come up with the contents of the drive:

This means that we can at least read from the NTFS drive, but of course we want to know if the write
support is working. To test this, you can go to any subfolder (or stay in the root folder) of the NTFS drive,
right-click on the free space, and select Create Folder (you could as well select Create Document):
Type in the name of the new folder. If the folder is created without errors, this means that write support is
working for our NTFS drive!
Before you switch off/disconnect your NTFS drive from your Ubuntu system, you must unmount it (or
you risk filesystem damage!). To do this, right-click on the drive's desktop icon and select Eject:

After the drive's desktop icon has disappeared, you can unplug and switch off the drive.
4 Troubleshooting

If you plug in your NTFS drive, and it doesn't get mounted, but you see an error message saying
something like:

Cannot mount volume.

Unable to mount the volume 'BACKUP'.

$LogFile indicates unclean shutdown (0, 0) Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Operation not supported Mount
is denied because NTFS logfile is unclean. Choose one action: Boot Windows and shutdown it cleanly, or
if you have a removable device then click the 'Safely Remove Hardware' icon in the Windows taskbar
notification area before disconnecting it. Or Run ntfsfix version 1.13.1 on Linux unless you have Vista.
Or Mount the NTFS volume with the 'ro' option in read-only mode.

this means that the NTFS drive wasn't safely removed from your Windows system before.

To fix this, we must boot into our Windows system again and plug in our NTFS drive. In the Windows
Explorer, right-click on the drive and select Properties:

Then go to the Extras tab and select to check the drive for errors

Select the option to automatically correct filesystem errors

Afterwards, you can connect the drive to your Ubuntu system, and it should now be mounted without
errors.

5 Links

• ntfs-3g: http://www.ntfs-3g.org
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com