Praveen Arimbrathodiyil blogs here

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There was some discussions in fsug-tvm list about handling ntfs partitions in GNU/Linux. I thought I will summarise the steps here.

ntfs is a minefield of Microsoft patents and linux support has been very carefull and write support came only recently. Now mainline kernel has ntfs module (not sure if write support is still experimental), but most people are using ntfs-3g userspace program based on fuse.

Step 1:

Find out the device name of the partition

pravi@parimbrath:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0adb0ada                     

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        5195    41728806    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            5196        6411     9767520    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3            6412        9729    26651835    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            6412        6423       96358+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6            6424        9729    26555413+  8e  Linux LVM

We are interested in /dev/sda1 here.

Step 2:
Find out ownership and group information of the device

pravi@parimbrath:~$ ls -l /dev/sda1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 2009-02-20 04:04 /dev/sda1

We know the device has write access for root and members of disk group.

Step3:
Add any user who need access to this partition to disk group.

sudo usermod -aG disk pravi

Now user pravi has write access to the device through membership in the disk group. Alternately, you may change the ownership and group of the device also, but I prefer the former.

(you will need to logout and login to take the group membership to take effect)

Step4:
Add the entry to /etc/fstab

/dev/sda1  /windows  ntfs-3g defaults,users,uid=pravi       0       0

Thats all! You may need to install ntfs-3g package if it is not installed already.