Can linux read ntfs disks

How to mount partition with ntfs file system and read write access

NTFS stands for New Technology File System and is developed by Microsoft for use on their Windows operating systems. NTFS is not normally used on Linux systems, but has been the default file system on Windows for many years. Linux users are probably used to seeing drives with the ext4 file system, which is ordinarily the default and certainly the most widespread in the Linux realm.

Although NTFS is a proprietary file system meant especially for Windows, Linux systems still have the ability to mount partitions and disks that have been formatted as NTFS. Thus a Linux user could read and write files to the partition as easily as they could with a more Linux-oriented file system. This may come in handy if you need to troubleshoot problems for a Windows-formatted disk, or if you recover a disk from a Windows machine and want to read its contents.

In this tutorial, we’ll show command line examples of how to mount NTFS partitions on any Linux distribution. This will include examples for mounting with only read access, or read and write access, as well as temporary mounting or persistent mounts that will survive future reboots. Keep reading and we will teach you how.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to install ntfs-3g and fuse on all major Linux distros
• How to mount NTFS formatted partition on Linux
• How to persistently mount NTFS partition
• How to mount NTFS partition with read only and read and write access

Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions

Category	Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System	Any Linux distro
Software	ntfs-3g, fuse
Other	Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions	# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Install ntfs-3g and fuse

Linux systems rely on a software package called “ntfs-3g” in order to have the ability to mount NTFS formatted hard drive partitions. This works along with “fuse”, and both of these packages are very likely to already be installed on your system by default. We’ve tested numerous distributions and all of them came with the native ability to mount NTFS partitions because they already have these packages installed.

Just to cover all our bases, you can use the appropriate command below to check if the ntfs-3g and fuse software, along with their dependencies, are installed on your system. If they aren’t, they will be installed when you execute this command. And if the packages have fallen out of date, they will be updated.

To install ntfs-3g and fuse on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint:

$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install ntfs-3g fuse

To install ntfs-3g and fuse on CentOS, Fedora, AlmaLinux, and Red Hat:

$ sudo dnf install ntfs-3g fuse

To install ntfs-3g and fuse on Arch Linux and Manjaro:

$ sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g fuse

Mount NTFS partition on Linux

After installing ntfs-3g (or verifying that it’s already installed), you can use the following command line examples to mount an NTFS formatted partition on your system. Use whichever commands you find most appropriate for your scenario.

In the examples below, our NTFS partition is accessible through /dev/sdb , and we will be mounting it to the /mnt/ntfs directory. Use the parted command if you need to identify the path through which your NTFS partition is accessed.

Then, create the path where you plan to mount the partition, if it hasn’t already been created.

1. The most basic mount command would look like this. It should mount your NTFS partition with read and write permissions. This is probably the only command that most users will need.

$ sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb /mnt/ntfs

$ sudo mount -o ro -t ntfs /dev/sdb /mnt/ntfs

$ sudo mount -o rw -t ntfs /dev/sdb /mnt/ntfs

Mount NTFS partition automatically

To make the NTFS partition mount automatically each time the computer boots up, we’ll need to add a line to the /etc/fstab file on our system. Use nano or your favorite text editor to open it up under root permissions.

Then, add the following line to the file, while substituting your own device directory and mount path.

/dev/sdb /mnt/ntfs ntfs defaults 0 0

After you’ve made that addition, save the file and close it. To activate the new change right away, you can execute the following command.

Otherwise, the partition will mount automatically upon the next system reboot.

Closing Thoughts

In this guide, we saw how to mount an NTFS formatted partition on any major Linux distribution. This is facilitated by the ntfs-3g and fuse software packages, which are normally installed by default on most systems. Other than this requirement, mounting and accessing NTFS partitions is mostly the same process as any other type of disk. This will give users access to files that once belonged to a Windows computer.

A user may find themselves mounting an NTFS drive in cases where they must perform file recovery on a Windows-formatted disk. Other cases might include if they need to read an external or portable hard disk, which has been formatted with NTFS. Even after using the NTFS disk on your Linux system, it should still work fine when it goes back into a Windows computer, provided there was nothing wrong with it in the first place.

Related Linux Tutorials:

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NTFS

NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family.

The ntfs3 kernel driver provides read and write support for the file system.

• All officially supported kernels with versions 5.15 or newer are built with CONFIG_NTFS3_FS=m and thus support it. Before 5.15, NTFS read and write support is provided by the NTFS-3G FUSE file system. Or you can use backported NTFS3 via ntfs3-dkmsAUR .
• Paragon Software, the author of the kernel module, has not yet released userspace utilities for NTFS3. You can use NTFS-3G userspace utilities without NTFS-3G driver via ntfsprogs-ntfs3AUR .

Tips and tricks

Improving performance

You can enable the prealloc mount(8) option to decrease fragmentation in case of parallel write operations (most useful for HDD).

Prevent creation of names not allowed by Windows

NTFS itself does not have restrictions for characters and names used, but Windows does.

Since the kernel version 6.2, ntfs3 supports windows_names mount(8) option. Use it to strictly maintain compatibility.

Known issues

Explicit file system type required to mount

ntfs3 requires the file system type to mount.

To be able to mount the file system, specify its type as ntfs3 . For example, using mount(8) ‘s -t / —types option:

# mount -t ntfs3 /dev/sdxY /mnt 

Troubleshooting

unknown filesystem type ‘ntfs’

When mounting NTFS, you can encounter an error such as:

mount: /mnt: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'

If you want to use ntfs3 as the default driver for ntfs partitions, such udev rule does the trick:

/etc/udev/rules.d/ntfs3_by_default.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="block", ENV=="ntfs", ENV="ntfs3"

Although, this method is not recommended and can confuse some 3rd party tools.

udisks support

This article or section is out of date.

Reason: The described problems have been fixed. Since kernel version 6.2, ntfs3 supports windows_names option. (Discuss in Talk:NTFS)

udisks supports NTFS3, but has some issues at the moment. See udisks ntfs3 PR and issue 932.

Issues can manifest as the following errors, when the NTFS3 driver is used because NTFS-3G is not installed, but with mount options that it does not recognize:

ntfs3: Unknown parameter 'windows_names'

Filesystem type ntfs3,ntfs not configured in kernel

The second error in particular can be encountered with Dolphin. Nautilus can also report the same error message in the case of a dirty NTFS partition (see #Unable to mount with ntfs3 with partition marked dirty).

As a workaround, add a such option to /etc/udisks2/mount_options.conf in [defaults] section:

ntfs_defaults=uid=$UID,gid=$GID,prealloc

Unable to mount with ntfs3 with partition marked dirty

When trying to mount a good NTFS partition (i.e. which successfully mounts with NTFS-3G and for which ntfsfix —no-action does not report any error), you may get the following error:

mount: /mnt: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. dmesg(1) may have more information after failed mount system call.

ntfs3 will not mount a partition where the volume is marked dirty without the force option. dmesg explicitly helps recognizing the situation, saying:

sdb1: volume is dirty and "force" flag is not set!

You can try passing the —clear-dirty argument to ntfsfix to clean it. [1]

See also

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