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I cannot copy films from NTFS partition on my computer (with Ubuntu) to ext2 hard drive installed in player "Dune". Please help.

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2 Answers

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I suspect your NTFS partition gets automatically mounted at boot. If we were speaking about i.e. a USB disk you attach to your computer, the permissions would be set correctly when you click on the volume in your file manager.

So there is probably an entry in your /etc/fstab file which looks like this:

...
someWeirdId  /media/name  ntfs  auto,stuff,stuff,stuff  0  0

change this to:

...
someWeirdId  /media/name  ntfs  auto,stuff,stuff,stuff,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=0000  0  0

This gives ownership of the mounted volume to the user with uid 1000, which would be the first user in your system. Enter id on a terminal to see what uid and gid you have.

Setting umask to 0000 should grant all permissions to every user anyway.

NTFS and FAT cannot store posix permissions, like they are used by Linux (actually i'am not sure about NTFS, but I wouldn't know how).

However you can use the program fuse-posixovl to mount a directory (!) on any partition (regardless if posix permissions are suipported or not) to another directory (or the same directory if you feel like it). posixovl will create a file on the real filesystem storing the posix permissions you set in the other mountpoint. This way you get full posix functionality on any non-posix file system.

To be able to change file ownership, etc. you should run posixovl as root (via sudo).

sudo mount.posixovl /directory/on/ntfs/partition /directory/where/i/use/chown

As I said source and target directories can theoretically be the same, but try it with different directorys first, just to be sure.

The permissions will not be effective unless posixovl is used. So you can't protect your data when you attach the disk to friends computer or something. The files will be accessible anyway.

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up vote -1 down vote

You can chown your NTFS partion:

sudo chown -R username:username /dev/sdbx where you would want to replace sdbx with the correct sdb.

run sudo fdisk -l to figure out your sdb

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no! this will not affect the mounted file system, it's useless for the problem case. (although technically, yes, you would chown the partition) – Paul Hänsch Oct 29 '12 at 18:59
@PaulHänsch I don't quite get it. Ubuntu is probably installed on the ext partition while the NTFS partition just has stuff right? – drN Oct 29 '12 at 19:00
1  
when you mount a filesystem, the permissions of the files on this filesystem have no relationship to the permissions of the block device from which the filesystem was mounted. Set permissions for a block device only to grant raw device access to a user, i.e. creating a file system (aka. formating the device) or partitioning a hard disk. – Paul Hänsch Oct 29 '12 at 19:11

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