Best practice to keep a NTFS partition constantly mounted?

Question

Hey all, I Dual-boot using a NTFS partition to house shared docs and some program files between Windows and Ubuntu. When this extra media partition isn't mounted automatically at startup it causes usability problems. In the past I have installed and used "NTFS Configuration Tool" to achieve this. Since I just cleanly installed ubuntu 11.04, I thought it would be fitting to ask if anyone has found a better method?

Answer 1

From what i can gleen from the question, you should add the device to the fstab for auto mounting at boot time. I've got several dual boot pc's on my network and they auto-mount the NTFS partition without any usability issues.

My personal mount line in /etc/fstab looks like this:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/large ntfs user 0 0

if you dont want it to auto-mount at boot, you can always add the noauto flag

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/large noauto,ntfs user 0 0

With this particular line, any user can mount/unmount the volume.

Answer 2

There are couple of ways, but my recommendation is... make required no folders in /mnt

sudo mkdir /mnt/C /mnt/D  

Then, check your partition list using

sudo fdisk -l

note the enteries from the list. Now open /etc/fstab so that you can write into it

sudo gedit /etc/fstab  

Now add entries in the following manner

/dev/sda2 /mnt/C ntfs-3g rw,user,fmask=0111,dmask=0000 0 0  
/dev/sda3 /mnt/D ntfs-3g rw,user,fmask=0111,dmask=0000 0 0  

Note:
/dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3 will be replaced with entries you get from fdisk -l, and
/mnt/C and /mnt/D shall replace with your directories you made using mkdir.
To understand what fmask and dmask do please visit Fmask

Answer 3

I've used PYDSM (Storage device manager) for quite some time. Its simple and straightforward. I'm pretty sure you can get it in the Software Center