Ubuntu – Unable to mount external NTFS HDDs due to duplicate UUID

external-hddfstabmountntfsuuid

I'm trying to setup /etc/fstab to automatically mount two external NTFS hard drives on boot, and decided to use the UUIDs as reference instead of the device names.

Strangely, blkid reports that both hard disks have the exact same UUID, so I am unable to add both entries into the file. Here's what it shows for the two disks:

/dev/sdc1: LABEL="Hank's Legacy" UUID="D8249BB8249B97D8" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="61bf885b-01"

/dev/sdb1: LABEL="Hank's Mainframe" UUID="D8249BB8249B97D8" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="f865b797-01"

I read that tune2fs cannot be used to modify the UUID for NTFS partitions, because this is technically not a UUID, but a serial number. Any suggestions on how I can mount the two disks without causing conflicts?

Best Answer

To mount an NTFS drive we can also use a disk label only. We can safely change the label from Windows or by using ntfslabel . See

Needless to say that by using ntfslabel we can also change a partition's UUID (aka serial number). To avoid negative effects on the UUID dependent Windows file allocation we should only change the upper part of the UUID (which is not used by Windows):

sudo ntfslabel --new-half-serial[=ssssssss] /dev/sdXN

Example:

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Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Automount NTFS partition like Nautilus do

The fuse mounting done by nautilus has one advantage over system-wide mounts in /etc/fstab: it knows which user is doing the mounting. Assuming you are the only user of your client machine (which is fair enough these days), you can get your numeric UID and GID and default umask with:

$ id
uid=1001(msw) gid=1001(msw) groups=…
$ umask 
0002

then you'd add these to the options group in fstab

defaults,uid=1001,gid=1001,umask=077,windows_names,locale=…

it would be wise, but not required to replace defaults with

auto,rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec

nautilus assumes that a user mounted partition is "untrusted" so flags them this way. A foreign (i.e. NTFS) partition should probably always be viewed with such suspicion.

added in response to comment:

This is an area where cross-system semantics get weird. The mount.ntfs(8) manual defines fmask and dmask to try to make files created on an NTFS filesystem behave better. Can I ls a directory not owned by me under windows? Should I be able to? Is there any relation between your UID on Linux and Windows? Dunno.

There is a usermapping= option for mount.ntfs which supersedes uid, gid, umask, fmask, and dmask. I suggest you look into that if you want fine control on what files are assigned what permissions. I would check to see that you can even access them from the Windows side before committing too much under a usermapping mount.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Automount NTFS partition like Nautilus do

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