Ubuntu – NTFS Support (NTFS-3G)
I needed some data from my other harddrive in my laptop, my work harddrive, but the harddrive is NTFS formatted and this is something that again is not natively supported.
I Google’d and found that NTFS-3G offers the best NTFS support, both for read and write. However, I am not planning to do any writing to my work harddrive, since NTFS has always been an issue in Linux and one write might break the entire partition.
Looking at the NTFS-3G website, there was too many instructions for my taste, so I thought of the easiest way, just using features already available in Ubuntu.
Here is how to get it working….
1. Go to Add/Remove
2. In the search field “ntfs” and hit Enter. The first result should be the “NTFS Configuration Tool”
3. Place a check mark in the “NTFS Configuration Tool” and click “Apply”.
4. Click “Apply” in the installation confirmation window.
5. Wait while the installation completes
6. Once the installation has completed, just click “Close”.
7. Once installed, you will be able to find the “NTFS Configuration Tool” under System > Administration
8. Unfortunately, the application is very simple and not that userfriendly or maybe too userfriendly. When starting it you are simply prompted with which NTFS harddrives/partitions are found and what the mount point is. If you are okay with the setup, simply click “Apply”.
9. However, it is possible to change the mount point directory by simply double-clicking on the text, then you can edit freely as seen here.
10. Once you clicked “Apply” you are prompted with a second dialog window, which allows you to enable write support. Click “OK” to proceed.
11. Now on your desktop you should have a new drive icon called System. This is the mounted harddrive/partition.
Extra
I noticed that after a reboot my mounted drive was still there, something, which I did not want. After some fiddling around, it is due to the fact that NTFS Configuration Tool mounts the harddrive in the FSTAB file, which basically means it will be mounted each time you start up the computer.
1. Now how to get around this; open a Terminal, type in “sudo gedit /etc/fstab” and hit enter
2. The standard text editor will now open. Find the line which has the mount point in it. If you used the default option, this should be “/media/System”. Simply delete the line and hit the X to close the texteditor (remember to save as you close)
3. Last thing is to unmount the System drive and this is done using the command “sudo umount /media/System” (/media/System is the mount point, so if you changed this earlier, remember to enter the right path)
Works in OS X too, via Disk Utility.