Mounting NTFS on Linux machines

Tags linux

Summary

This article explains how to mount Windows-made NTFS volumes on Linux systems.

Environment

Any Fedora-based (RHEL, CentOS) or Debian-based (Ubuntu) Linux distributions.

Directions

Please note: In certain cases, like for a user utilizing the GUI or on a laptop, simply following the 1st step to install ntfs-3g should be enough to mount the drive when connected.

  1. Install the ntfs-3g and fuse packages:
    • RHEL/Fedora/CentOS — sudo dnf install ntfs-3g fuse  (use yum if dnf command is not found)
    • Ubuntu (usually preinstalled) — sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g fuse
  2. Create a mount point: mkdir /path/to/folder
     
  3. Find out the UUID of volume: sudo blkid

    Example output:
    /dev/sda3: LABEL="Data" UUID="519CB82E5888AD0F" TYPE="ntfs"
    /dev/sda5: UUID="00d7d951-2a35-40fd-8e5d-411bb824ff3b" TYPE="swap"
    /dev/sda6: LABEL="Ubuntu" UUID="6044b1d0-208e-4ab3-850d-03a92e1516fc" TYPE="ext4"
     
  4. Edit the file system table to mount on boot: sudo nano /etc/fstab
     
  5. Add a line for the NTFS volume (using UUID from Step 3):
    UUID="519CB82E5888AD0F"              /path/to/folder            ntfs-3g        defaults          0   0

Please note: If the drive is an external USB or is likely to not be connected during boot, you may want to add nofail to the mount options to ensure there are no issues during boot if the drive is not connected, e.g.,
UUID="519CB82E5888AD0F"              /path/to/folder            ntfs-3g        defaults,nofail          0   0

  1. Remount all file systems, including the new NTFS file system: sudo mount -a

References

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