Linux – Unable to mount drive as read-write

arch linuxautomountingfstabmount

I have a 1TB HDD (/dev/sda1, mount point /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF) that I'm trying to mount as read-write, but I can only get it to mount as read-only.

System:

$ uname -a
Linux <hostname> 4.10.6-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Mar 27 08:28:22 CEST 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ lsblk -f
NAME   FSTYPE LABEL       UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                            
└─sda1 ntfs               4733A97E4133EADF                     /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF
sdb                                                            
├─sdb1 swap               d9cea12d-5273-49ef-8950-3cd662fe63c7 [SWAP]
└─sdb2 ext4               e09a8578-53e9-4c26-9a97-a47b6350a1ab /
...

What I've tried

  • Adding a fstab entry to automount the drive on boot:
$ cat /etc/fstab
# 
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>                 <dir>                   <type>      <options>           <dump>  <pass>
# /dev/sdb2
UUID=e09a8578-53e9-4c26-9a97-a47b6350a1ab   /                       ext4        rw,relatime,data=ordered    0   1

# /dev/sdb1
UUID=d9cea12d-5273-49ef-8950-3cd662fe63c7   none                    swap        defaults            0   0

# /dev/sda1
UUID=4733A97E4133EADF               /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF  ntfs        defaults,users,user     0   0

I've tried with defaults, defaults,users, and defaults,users,user. Rebooted after each change, but the drive is still mounted as read-only:

$ ls -l /run/media/<name>
...
dr-x------ 1 root  root  4096 Mar 28 17:35 4733A97E4133EADF
...
  • Manually remounting:
$ sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sda1 /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF
mount: cannot remount /dev/sda1 read-write, is write-protected
$ sudo umount /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF
$ sudo mount -o rw /dev/sda1 /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF

At this point, the command just hanged for a few minutes, so I terminated it.

$ sudo umount /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /run/media/<name>/4733A97E4133EADF

No change.

As of yet, I have not been able to write to the drive at all (from this system, at least), even as root.

chown, chmod have no effect because the filesystem is read-only.

What must I do to (auto)mount this drive as read-write, with normal (non-root) user access?

Have tried solutions from the following:

Best Answer

Although @ingopingo answered the question in one of the comments, i am going to write an answer with further information now.

By default the Linux kernel only supports reading from the NTFS file system. For read/write access you will need a read-write NTFS driver like the ntfs-3g package from extra repository.

After installation with sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g you are able to mount your NTFS partitions the usual way with sudo mount /path/to/ntfs /mount/point. This is possible due to a symlink of /usr/bin/mount.ntfs to /usr/bin/ntfs-3g.

Note: You need to have root privilegs to mount the filesystem. Requirements for an exception are listed in the ntfs-3g-FAQ.

Using the default settings the NTFS-partition will be mounted at boot. Put the following in your /etc/fstab:

/path/to/ntfs /mount/point ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

To be able to read-write with a non-root user, you have to set some additional options (username has to be changed to your username):

/path/to/ntfs /mount/point ntfs-3g uid=username,gid=users,umask=0022 0 0

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