Adding NTFS support to Fedora Core

Introduction

Fedora Core is a Linux distribution. You can get it there.
This tutorial will guide you, step by step, through the installation of NTFS support (read only) for Fedora Core.
For this tutorial, we used Fedora Core 4 64 bits and stuff from linux-ntfs.org.

Summary

• Introduction
• Material
• Instructions
• Credits

Material

You need :

• Some Fedora Core installed
• The proper kernel-module-ntfs file : for us it was kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.14-1.1637_FC4-2.1.24-0.rr.10.4.x86_64.rpm
  • 2.6.14-1.1637_FC4 is the kernel version, to get your version, use uname -r (see previous tuts)
  • x86_64 stands for 64 bits - choose i586 or i686 (I don't know which one is the good one) if you have a 32 bits FC

Instructions

Installing kernel-module-ntfs

Download the good kernel-module-ntfs RPM.
Install it (double-click on it to launch the installation).

Testing the installation

To check if the RPM was successfully installed, let's try to mount an NTFS partition : in the terminal, type :

• mkdir /mnt/c (creates a directory named c in the /mnt folder)
• mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/c -t ntfs -r -o nls=iso8859-1
  Notes :
  • it will be /dev/hda1 if your HD isn't SATA ; replace the "1" with the right number depending on your partition set.
    Note that you can browse your /dev directory to check your partitions' names (hda1, hda2, hda3, etc, sda1, sda2, etc).
    For us : we have : sda1 (C:), sda2 (logical), sda5 (D:), sda6 (E:), sda7 (F:), sda8 (G:), sda9 (linux).
  • replace iso8859-1 with your own codepage, eg utf8, iso8859-1 (Western Europe), iso8859-2 (Central Europe), gb2312 (Simplified Chinese), iso8859-8 (Hebrew)
  • -t ntfs means the filesystem is ntfs
  • -r means it will be read-only (this is the default value, because it's not safe yet to write with this driver)

If the installation failed, you'll get an error message  : mount: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'.
Browse your /mnt/c directory, it should be like your Windows C: drive.

You can mount your other partitions too (optional).

Making the new partitions permanent

When you restart Linux, the partitions that you mounted above will disappear... to avoid having to mount them manually every time you restart Linux, we are going to edit a configuration files so that these partitions are always mounted when Linux starts.
Create a backup of /etc/fstab, then open it (you need to have root privileges to be able to save it) and add every partition you want to add this way :
/dev/sda1 /mnt/c ntfs ro,umask=0222 0 0 (umask sets users permissions, see the links in the credits for more informations)
For us, it gives, at the end of the file :

/dev/sda1 /mnt/c ntfs ro,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/sda5 /mnt/d ntfs ro,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/sda6 /mnt/e ntfs ro,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/sda7 /mnt/f ntfs ro,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/sda8 /mnt/g ntfs ro,umask=0222 0 0

Save the fstab file.
That's all, when you restart Fedora Core, you'll have your NTFS partitions mounted :)

Credits

We made massive use of the FAQ from linux-ntfs.org, particularly section 4.