Linux Tips - 2

2. Installing newer FUSE module.

You may get some warning while mounting ntfs partition. One sample warning is as follows. This indicates that the FUSE module is old.

WARNING: Old FUSE kernel module detected. This means, some driver features are not available (swap file on NTFS, boot from NTFS by LILO), and unmount is not safe unless you make sure the ntfs-3g process naturally terminates after calling 'umount'. The safe FUSE kernel driver is included in the official Linux kernels since version 2.6.20-rc1, or in the FUSE 2.6 software package. Please see the next page for more help: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#fuse26

If so, you can manually install the newer fuse module.

Download new fuse tarball from here.

Untar the downloaded file.

# tar -xzvf fuse-2.6.x.tar.gz

Remove the old module.

# rmmod fuse

Change to the fuse-2.6.x directory and run following commands.

# ./configure --enable-kernel-module

# make

# make install

Make sure that you get no errors after configure command. If you don't have kernel source code available, the it will give some errors.

Once these commands are executed successfully, you can mount ntfs partitions without any warnings.

Linux Tips - 1

I am referring to Fedora Core 6.

1. How to mount windows NTFS partitions in read/write mode?

This tip tells you how to make your linux system capable of mounting NTFS partitions in read/write mode. After this you are no longer constrained to the linux partitions. You can use windows partitions to read and even to write the data.

Change to root.

Make sure that Livna repository is set up.

# rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

# rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY

Now install fuse and ntfs modules.

# yum install fuse fuse-libs ntfs-3g ntfsprogs ntfsprogs-gnomevfs

Once these modules get installed successfully, you can mount the windows ntfs partitions as

# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

Note: This assumes that a directory named 'windows' is present under /mnt. You can alternatively mount it under any directory but it is always a good idea to mount it under /mnt.