Obligatory computer question

[memnus]

So, I've almost got SKYLARK/SKYLARK64 set up, with a Win XP Pro/Debian dual-boot situation going on. The only problem is the shared partition - I have it mounting as my uid, with full permissions (I think) but it's still acting write-protected. I couldn't convince anything to format a 160-GB FAT partition, so it's NTFS which Debian insists works just fine. Here's the applicable fstab line:

/dev/sda5     /mnt/shared    ntfs    uid=1000,gid=100,fmask=1,dmask=0,user,rw    1    3

Am I missing something? uid=1000 is byoung and gid=100 is users. /mnt/shared has byoung and owner and all permissions set... I think. Help?

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Comments

[avani.livejournal.com]

Last I heard, using NTFS under Debian is read-only by default, and writeable only if you enable experimental features in the kernel (not entirely reliable).

Do you need to be able to write to all of that 160G partition? Can you repartition it to more manageable chunks.

[memnus.livejournal.com]

That would be the music/movies partition, so yes, it needs to be writable, and all as one block. Looks like I'll be looking a bit harder for a way to make if FAT ... is the no-formatting-a-partition-over-40GB a Windows limit, or a FAT32 limit?

[carmiendo.livejournal.com]

'ntfs-3g' claims to let you write to an NTFS partition without problems. anecdotally, i've been using it for about a year and haven't noticed anything get corrupted.

[bjencks.livejournal.com]

ntfs-3g (which works under FUSE, IIRC) is stable enough, including write support, that Ubuntu is planning to include it by default, or close to it. It seems to be the modern way to do NTFS.

[carmiendo.livejournal.com]

awesome, i have backup! and i didn't know that about ubuntu; awesome!

it's super easy - all you have to do (if i'm remembering correctly) is apt-get it and then change the line in your fstab to say 'ntfs-3g' instead of ntfs. then smile a lot.

[memnus.livejournal.com]

That seemed to work.

Except the Debian repository didn't have the latest version (2.6) of fuse, so I had to uninstall it from Synaptic and install from source. I'm hoping this doesn't become a problem in the future if Synaptic tries to install 2.5 again.