# Solved: ntfsmount



## Lost in Here (Jun 8, 2007)

I need to be able to write ntfs in RHEL 5 to attempt to salvage my windows drive. I found ntfsmount which is supposed to allow you to do this but I cannot get it to work. After installing FUSE and ntfsprogs I get this error message when trying to mount the partition:

bash: ntfsmount: command not found

I need to recover my windows partition or I'm in trouble. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

Hi Lost in Here,

Welcome to TSG!

In order to both read and write to an NTFS partition from Linux, you need a Linux kernel with the appropriate NTFS driver support, i.e. ntfs-3g. Off the top of my head that would be later than 2.6.15 or so, but only if the ntfs-3g driver is installed and/or loaded. I am not sure what level the kernel under RHEL 5 is at. You should execute the command:
$ uname -r
to print the kernel release identification.

That said, you would need to first identify the NTFS partition from Linux, so execute:
$ sudo fdisk -l
or from the root account:
# fdisk -l

When you have identified the NTFS partition, first you need to make a temporary directory to be the mount point for the mount command (from the root account):
# mkdir /mnt/ntfs

Then you would issue the mount command:
# mount -v -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/ntfs
where the fdisk -l command identified the NTFS partition as on disk devicename = /dev/sda1

You can explore in more depth here including ntfsmount. Additionally, you should explore the lsmod and modprobe man pages for those commands.

-- Tom


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## Lost in Here (Jun 8, 2007)

Kernel version:
2.6.18-53.1.6.el5

Red Hat doesn't natively support ntfs even though the kernel has the capacity. I have however installed another utility that allowed me to mount the drive in read-only mode.

After mounting the drive per your instructions I recieved this message:

/dev/hda1 on /mnt/c type ntfs (rw)

I attempted to alter the driver that I suspect is causing me problems. I could not. I also could not change the permissions from read only to read and write so I either screwed up or I despite the message, it is still in read only mode. 

The fact that I cannot use ntfsmount leads me to believe that either FUSE or ntfsprogs did not install successfully or there was something wrong with a package I downloaded. I just don't really know what the problem is. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.


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## Lost in Here (Jun 8, 2007)

I don't know what I did differently but the 200th time was the charm.

Thanks


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## lotuseclat79 (Sep 12, 2003)

If you mounted the drive per my instructions as you have said and got the message:
dev/hda1 on /mnt/c type ntfs (rw)
then the drive was mounted read-write.

So, all you needed to do to access the files was to:
$ cd /mnt/c
and then read, copy or write the files with linux commands, and ignore the use of the ntfsmount comman altogether.

-- Tom


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## Lost in Here (Jun 8, 2007)

When I mounted per your instruction it didn't allow me to edit the file. It reported it was in (rw) but when I attempted to write to the drive I got an error. The permissions on the files were set to read-only and I could not change them (from root). This does not surprise me because I had installed a package that allowed read-only from RHEL5 and, as I stated previously, RHEL will not support or ship with any NTFS support.


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