I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent GO USB portable disk. It's
powered by the USB bus, so no bulky power adapter

But, it was formatted with NTFS and I was not able to write to it, so I
reformatted it VFAT so I could move the files I had to work with. This
was done with my system at work, running Etch, kernel 2.6.18-4-686 (as
is, from Debian).

Two days ago, I was working with a 300GB USB drive (desktop storage,
with power adapter) which I attached to my system at home, also running
Etch and (I believe) the same kernel. Only, in this case, the disk was
mounted read/write and I was able to copy files to it.

So, I thought, I must have done something wrong at work. So, today,
I've wiped the FreeAgent clean and reformatted the disk with NTFS (first
with the 'mkntfs' utility on my Linux Etch box, second on a Windows XP
system of a co-worker).

I've also adjusted the associated options in /etc/fstab, but I still
can't write to the disk. Below is output from various commands, showing
that the owner and group of the mount point are set, the permissions are
OK, etc. But, even 'root' can't touch this disk.

$ pwd
/media/usb0
$ pwd
/media/usb0
$ ls -ld
drwxrwx--- 1 rmcgowan rmcgowan 4096 2007-08-17 13:38 .
$ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwx--- 1 rmcgowan rmcgowan 0 2007-08-17 13:38 System Volume Information
$ touch abc
touch: cannot touch `abc': Permission denied
$ mkdir xyz
mkdir: xyz: [Operation not permitted]
$ su
Password:
# touch xyz
touch: cannot touch `xyz': Permission denied
# mount
<-- removed other irrelevant mounts-->
/dev/sde1 on /media/usb0 type ntfs \
(rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=00 7,user=rmcgowan)

I then thought I should try the FUSE based tools, so I removed the
ntfsprogs package and libntfs9 that it depends on and tried to install
ntfs-3g. But it depends on 'libfuse2 (>=2.6), but all that's available
in Etch is 2.5.3-4.4, which is already installed. If I go to SID, I can
get the right libfuse2, but installing it wants to change out too much,
I can't take the chance with my work system of breaking something.

Any thoughts on why the existing Etch tools (ntfsprogs) won't work?

Thanks,

--
Bob McGowan

On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 14:03 -0700, Bob McGowan wrote:
> But, it was formatted with NTFS and I was not able to write to it[...]
> [...]
> I've also adjusted the associated options in /etc/fstab, but I still
> can't write to the disk.

Hello.

The standard NTFS kernel driver and ntfsprogs have only a limited
write support. E.g. the kernel driver only allows to change existing
files, but without changing their length.

> I then thought I should try the FUSE based tools, so I removed the
> ntfsprogs package and libntfs9 that it depends on and tried to install
> ntfs-3g. But it depends on 'libfuse2 (>=2.6), but all that's available
> in Etch is 2.5.3-4.4, which is already installed. [...]

NTFS-3G is not in stable yet, try installing it from
http://backports.org/. It will surely allow you to write.

--
Krzysztof Lubanski



--
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Krzysztof Lubański wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 14:03 -0700, Bob McGowan wrote:
>> But, it was formatted with NTFS and I was not able to write to it[...]
>> [...]
>> I've also adjusted the associated options in /etc/fstab, but I still
>> can't write to the disk.
>
> Hello.
>
> The standard NTFS kernel driver and ntfsprogs have only a limited
> write support. E.g. the kernel driver only allows to change existing
> files, but without changing their length.
>
>> I then thought I should try the FUSE based tools, so I removed the
>> ntfsprogs package and libntfs9 that it depends on and tried to install
>> ntfs-3g. But it depends on 'libfuse2 (>=2.6), but all that's available
>> in Etch is 2.5.3-4.4, which is already installed. [...]
>
> NTFS-3G is not in stable yet, try installing it from
> http://backports.org/. It will surely allow you to write.
>

That's the rub - I did try to install NTFS-3G, from backports, but it
has the dependency mentioned (on libfuse2 >=2.6), which didn't get
resolved by the installer.

I'll check backports again, and see if the libfuse2 library is there.
If so I'll try installing it "manually" and report back.

Thanks.

--
Bob McGowan

Bob McGowan wrote:
> Krzysztof Lubański wrote:
>> On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 14:03 -0700, Bob McGowan wrote:
>>> But, it was formatted with NTFS and I was not able to write to it[...]
>>> [...]
>>> I've also adjusted the associated options in /etc/fstab, but I still
>>> can't write to the disk.
>>
>> Hello.
>>
>> The standard NTFS kernel driver and ntfsprogs have only a limited
>> write support. E.g. the kernel driver only allows to change existing
>> files, but without changing their length.
>>
>>> I then thought I should try the FUSE based tools, so I removed the
>>> ntfsprogs package and libntfs9 that it depends on and tried to
>>> install ntfs-3g. But it depends on 'libfuse2 (>=2.6), but all that's
>>> available in Etch is 2.5.3-4.4, which is already installed. [...]
>>
>> NTFS-3G is not in stable yet, try installing it from
>> http://backports.org/. It will surely allow you to write.
>>
>
> That's the rub - I did try to install NTFS-3G, from backports, but it
> has the dependency mentioned (on libfuse2 >=2.6), which didn't get
> resolved by the installer.
>
> I'll check backports again, and see if the libfuse2 library is there. If
> so I'll try installing it "manually" and report back.
>
> Thanks.
>

OK, fuse 2.6 and libfuse 2.6 are on backports.org, but I had to download
the deb files manually and used dpkg to install them. After that, the
ntfs-3g package installed just fine.

Now, to see about using it

Thanks for the .

--
Bob McGowan
Symantec, Inc.

Bob McGowan wrote:
> Bob McGowan wrote:
>> Krzysztof Lubański wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 14:03 -0700, Bob McGowan wrote:
>>>> But, it was formatted with NTFS and I was not able to write to it[...]
>>>> [...]
>>>> I've also adjusted the associated options in /etc/fstab, but I still
>>>> can't write to the disk.
>>>
>>> Hello.
>>>
>>> The standard NTFS kernel driver and ntfsprogs have only a limited
>>> write support. E.g. the kernel driver only allows to change existing
>>> files, but without changing their length.
>>>
>>>> I then thought I should try the FUSE based tools, so I removed the
>>>> ntfsprogs package and libntfs9 that it depends on and tried to
>>>> install ntfs-3g. But it depends on 'libfuse2 (>=2.6), but all
>>>> that's available in Etch is 2.5.3-4.4, which is already installed.
>>>> [...]
>>>
>>> NTFS-3G is not in stable yet, try installing it from
>>> http://backports.org/. It will surely allow you to write.
>>>
>>
>> That's the rub - I did try to install NTFS-3G, from backports, but it
>> has the dependency mentioned (on libfuse2 >=2.6), which didn't get
>> resolved by the installer.
>>
>> I'll check backports again, and see if the libfuse2 library is there.
>> If so I'll try installing it "manually" and report back.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>
> OK, fuse 2.6 and libfuse 2.6 are on backports.org, but I had to download
> the deb files manually and used dpkg to install them. After that, the
> ntfs-3g package installed just fine.
>
> Now, to see about using it
>
> Thanks for the .

Well, closer, but not quite there...

I'm using kernel 2.6.18-5-686, which has the fuse driver, but it's not
full featured. I get this warning:

WARNING: Deficient Linux kernel detected. Some driver features are
not available (swap file on NTFS, boot from NTFS by LILO), and
unmount is not safe unless it's made sure the ntfs-3g process
naturally terminates after calling 'umount'. If you wish this
message to disappear then you should upgrade to at least kernel
version 2.6.20, or request from your distribution to fix
the kernel problem. The below web page has more information:
http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#fuse26

I've downloaded the source code for fuse version 2.6.5, compiled the
driver only, and installed it. The warning message is gone.

And I can mount the disk device rw as me. The problem is, I can't
unmount it ;(

mount reports this for the device:

/dev/sde1 on /media/ntfs type fuseblk
(rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,allow_other,blksize=4096)

/etc/fstab has:

/dev/sde1 /media/ntfs ntfs-3g rw,user,noauto 0 0

I don't see the "user=rmcgowan" that I'm used to seeing when I mount a
VFAT formated device. I believe that's part of the problem, as 'man
mount', under 'user' states the name of the user who mounted the device
is saved, so they can unmount it.

By setting the "users" option (note plural), any user is allowed to
unmount. This allows me to do so, but it would be nice to know no one
else can do it.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

--
Bob McGowan