No access to my NTFS hard drives as normal user [Solved]

[saybonuser56]

Hello,
How do you get the ntfs-3g driver installed and configured correctly so that a normal user has full read right access to the NTFS drives installed on a system? Does the Fuse file system also need to be installed? Any documentation you could point me to or advice provided here directly would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
saybonuser56


Thanks for all the help, I was able to resolve the problem by manually editing my /etc/fstab file by changing the specified file system from NTFS to NTFS-3g for all of my hard drives that are formatted to NTFS. Now on to some of my minor issues. I have been enjoying using Sabayon and I greatly appreciate the efforts of everyone who is involved in its development.

[wolfden]

which Sabayon are you running?

This should be working out of the box

[saybonuser56]

I apologize for forgetting to mention which version of Sabayon, I just downloaded the 64bit version of 4.2. I had the same problem when I tried the earlier 3.0 or might have been 3.5 64 bit version. The access to the NTFS drives was working correctly using the live DVD but did not work correctly once the system was installed. Right now I do not even have read access as a normal user and the only way I can look at the drives is to log in as root.

One of the other problems I ran into was an incorrect installation of Grub. This is not a problem exclusive to Sabayon but I think to every distro of Linux, at least all the ones I have tried and I have tried most of the major ones except for Slax. I built a new system back in April and ever since then I have had great difficulty with having a system that would boot after doing a Linux install. There is a major problem with incorrect drive mapping with the various distros in compairsion to how Grub maps them. Most of the distros map my drives all different with only two of them mapping them the same, but all of them are incorrect so I either get just a Grub with a flashing cursor or an error 17 at boot.

My system is as follows,
EVGA X58 mother board with Intel i7 920 processor
EVGA Geforce GTX 260 graphics card
6 GB of Corsair ddr3 memory
1000w Corsair power supply
1 SATA DVD drive
3 SATA hard drives (on the standard Intel SATA controller that is part of the X58 chipset with 6 SATA ports)
2 EIDE hard drives (on a Jmicron controller that also does the SATA raid ports

I am not sure if the hard drive mapping is done by the various distro builders in the form of a script or if it is done by the Kernel. All I know is none of them can get it correct with this mother board with the number of drives I have installed. I think that perhaps the single EIDE port supplied by the Jmicron chip set is the variable that messes up everything by being reported differently by each distro which moves all the rest of the drives around in their order. Right now there are 3 different main drive mappings and all of them are different. The order of the drives as the Bios has them is different than what Grub maps them (I checked them using the Super Grub Disk) and then the distros are all different than either the Bios or Grub. Sabayon was the weirdest in having a drive that is NTFS with a back up image for Vista on it as hda so I am certain that is where it put the boot loader but it is physically installed on either drive 3 or 4 of the SATA ports so when I rebooted my system all it said was Grub with a flashing cursor and just sat there.

Well I am no expert when it comes to Grub but out of necessity I have learned some about it so after I looked at how Grub was mapping the drives using the Super Grub Disk I was successful in manually editing the grub.conf and menu.lst file with the root mapping that grub was showing my drives, (still not sure if I need to edit the grub.conf file but seems to work ok when I have.) So far the only distro that I could not figure out how to edit the menu.lst file was Ubuntu, the ones I have tried so far have been, Mepis, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Dream Linux and Saybon. I am giving you all this information about my experience with Grub for your general info that you may want to pass along as a bug. I do not know if this classifies as a bug but if it does I do not know how to submit a correct bug report.

The only thing I have having problems with at the moment that is a deal breaker is the NTFS access, once I get this resolved I will move on to seeing if I can get my wacom drawing table working as well as my web cam.

Thanks for your help

[thecata]

From my experience with ntfs-3g:
1) make sure that your /etc/fstab specifies ntfs-3g as the filesystem type (if you specified during install that those partitions are ntfs, it will put ntfs, so... read-only)
2) if you are using 4.2 core cd, then you MUST install ntfs-3g (and as far as I know, this requires fuse as a dependency... if you install ntfs-3g using entropy/equo, it will install it for you); as far as I can remember, 4.2 KDE has ntfs-3g installed by default (don't know anything about the gnome version though)

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS-3G --> this page states that NTFS-3G uses FUSEamong others.

Hope it helps,
Cata

[Fitzcarraldo]

You should have the two packages sys-fs/ntfs3g and sys-fs/ntfsprogs installed:

Code: Select all

$ equo search ntfs
>>  @@ Searching...
>>   #1 Sabayon Linux Official Repository
>>      @@ Package: sys-fs/ntfs3g-2009.2.1              branch: 4
>>        Available:            version: 2009.2.1 ~ tag: NoTag ~ revision: 0
>>        Installed:            version: 2009.2.1 ~ tag: NoTag ~ revision: 0
>>        Slot:                 0
>>        Homepage:             http://www.ntfs-3g.org
>>        Description:          Open source read-write NTFS driver
>>                              that runs under FUSE
>>        License:              GPL-2
>>      @@ Package: sys-fs/ntfsprogs-2.0.0-r1           branch: 4
>>        Available:            version: 2.0.0-r1 ~ tag: NoTag ~ revision: 1
>>        Installed:            version: 2.0.0-r1 ~ tag: NoTag ~ revision: 1
>>        Slot:                 0
>>        Homepage:             http://www.linux-ntfs.org/
>>        Description:          User tools for NTFS filesystems
>>        License:              GPL-2
>>  Keyword:    ntfs
>>  Found:      2 entries

If you don't, then install them using the equo command as root user, or use the Sulfur GUI.

How are you mounting your NTFS HDD? To mount it you need to do something like:

Code: Select all

# cd /mnt
# mkdir MY_HDD
# ntfs-3g /dev/<device> /mnt/MY_HDD

Also have a look at the post Re: KDE 4.2 Dolphin automount NTFS on boot, which hopefully should be of help (Don't worry about the "automount on boot" in the title, it's generic advice too).

[saybonuser56]

From my experience with ntfs-3g:
1) make sure that your /etc/fstab specifies ntfs-3g as the filesystem type (if you specified during install that those partitions are ntfs, it will put ntfs, so... read-only)
2) if you are using 4.2 core cd, then you MUST install ntfs-3g (and as far as I know, this requires fuse as a dependency... if you install ntfs-3g using entropy/equo, it will install it for you); as far as I can remember, 4.2 KDE has ntfs-3g installed by default (don't know anything about the gnome version though)

Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS-3G --> this page states that NTFS-3G uses FUSEamong others.

Hope it helps,
Cata

Thanks for your post, I am certain that your first suggestion is the solution to the problem. I did not know that you could make that selection using the partition editor. All I remember seeing was plain NTFS, I will go and change that in the /etc/fstab file system entries to NTFS-3g and see if that solves the issue.