How to Mount an NTFS Filesystem

[Note: if you are running a centosplus kernel, see this section]

1. 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.

The EPEL repository carries ntfs-3g packages for CentOS-7 and CentOS-6. To install, after enabling the EPEL repo per the Repositories page: {{{yum install ntfs-3g fuse }}} or if you prefer to leave EPEL disabled by default {{{yum --enablerepo epel install ntfs-3g fuse }}}

You may also want to {{{yum install ntfsprogs ntfsprogs-gnomevfs }}} for additional functionality. Take, for example, ntfsclone to copy ntfs-partitions with or without empty space. ntfsprogs-gnomevfs is only available for CentOS 6.

2. 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 }}}

3. 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 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.

This is a read-only archived version of wiki.centos.org

How to Mount an NTFS Filesystem

1. Installing required packages

2. Mounting an NTFS filesystem

3. Users of the centosplus kernel