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How to Mount an NTFS Filesystem

[Note: if you are running a centosplus kernel, see this section]
Installing required packages
While older ntfs drivers were prone to eat your data in r/w-mode, ntfs-3g seems to be r/w safe. See the
ntfs-3g page for more information.
As of CentOS 5.4 (kernel 2.6.18-164 or newer), the fuse kernel module is included in the kernel itself.
Therefore, dkms and dkms-fuse are no longer required. If you have previously installed dkms-fuse, please
uninstall it by a yum remove dkms-fuse command. Please note that CentOS-4 users need those 2
packages.
Make sure you have the rpmforge repo installed. If not, refer to Repositories.
Install the following packages.
yum install fuse fuse-ntfs-3g
If the rpmforge repo is disabled by default,
yum --enablerepo=rpmforge install fuse fuse-ntfs-3g
Note for CentOS-5 users: If you are still running CentOS 5.3 or older, then you would need to install kmod-
fuse from ELRepo.
For CentOS-6 the EPEL repository is carrying later NTFS packages. EPEL is also usable for CentOS-5. To
install, after enabling the repo per the Repositories page:
yum install ntfs-3g
or if you prefer to leave EPEL disabled by default
yum --enablerepo epel install ntfs-3g
You may also want to
yum install ntfsprogs ntfsprogs-gnomevfs
for additional functionality.
Mounting an NTFS filesystem
Suppose your ntfs filesystem is /dev/sda1 and you are going to mount it on /mymnt/win, do the
following.
First, create a mount point.
mkdir /mymnt/win
Next, edit /etc/fstab as follows. To mount read-only:
/dev/sda1 /mymnt/win ntfs-3g ro,umask=0222,defaults 0 0
To mount read-write:
/dev/sda1 /mymnt/win ntfs-3g rw,umask=0000,defaults 0 0
You can now mount it by running:
mount /mymnt/win
Users of the centosplus kernel
The NTFS module is not enabled in the centoplus (Repositories/CentOSPlus) kernel starting with CentOS-
5.3. This is because NTFS in 5.3 is broken. Please see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=481495
for details. If you would like to use the NTFS driver from the CentOS kernel, you can do so by installing
kmod-ntfs from the ELRepo project. However, unlike ntfs-3g, the write option of the kernel ntfs module is
extremely limited. Here is a note from the kernel Kconfig file (thanks to AlanBartlett for this info):
"The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without changing the file length. No file or directory
creation, deletion or renaming is possible. Note only non-resident files can be written to so you may find that
some very small files (<500 bytes or so) cannot be written to."
The following description applies to CentOS 5.2 or older.
In CentOSPlus kernels, both ntfs and fuse kernel modules are enabled. The main difference between ntfs
and ntfs-3g is that the former is read-only, whilst the latter is read-write. Therefore, if you do not need write
access to a ntfs filesystem, there is no need to install additional packages. Simply add this line to
/etc/fstab :
/dev/sda1 /mymnt/win ntfs ro,umask=0222,defaults 0 0
If you wish to have read-write access, you would need the fuse-ntfs-3g package. But, because the fuse
module is already available in the kernel, you do not need the dkms package:
yum install fuse fuse-ntfs-3g
However, the fuse kernel module included in CentOS 5 (as of August 2007) produces a message:
WARNING: Deficient FUSE kernel module detected. It still works, but it is advised that the fuse module from
RPMforge (newer) be used instead. Also, you should update to the latest kernel which does not suffer from
TipsAndTricks/NTFS (last edited 2012-03-11 02:50:12 by PhilSchaffner)
this issue.
Therefore, run:
yum install fuse fuse-ntfs-3g dkms dkms-fuse
to replace the existing fuse kernel module with the one from RPMforge.
See also:
http://wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfs-en#can_i_mount_an_ntfs_volume (read-only mounting)
Originally written by AkemiYagi. Anyone is welcome to edit.