Access denied to my NTFS partition

King X13 · 10-15-2006, 10:47 PM

ok so whenever i have tried in the past i could never see my other hard drives while in linux. ie ntfs and fat32. so i read a couple of posts that LAW made saying you can so i figured id give it ago with what he said and try it on my linux. now i am even using the same username and password in both OS's, dont know if that matters or not. but when i go through the first step of mkdir /mnt/hda1 i get access denied. now in ubuntu if you go into computer you can see all your hard drives apparently even if you cant get into them because thats that i have. so i click on my drive that would be E:\ in windows and right click mount and this is the exect error message i get:

error: device /dev/sdb5 is not removable

error: could not execute pmount

any help would be great but not really urgent. thanks.

Law · 10-15-2006, 11:28 PM

You have to sudo or if you're using FC5, su in as root and make the directory first before mounting.

Remember to always try it as root if it doesn't work.

Do fdisk -l to find the name of your NTFS partition, it should be hdx# for IDE or sdx# for SCSI/SATA. Then just edit your fstab file which is located in /etc

Similar to mines

Code:

/dev/sda2            /                    reiserfs   acl,user_xattr        1 1
/dev/sdb6            swap                 swap       defaults              0 0
proc                 /proc                proc       defaults              0 0
sysfs                /sys                 sysfs      noauto                0 0
debugfs              /sys/kernel/debug    debugfs    noauto                0 0
usbfs                /proc/bus/usb        usbfs      noauto                0 0
devpts               /dev/pts             devpts     mode=0620,gid=5       0 0
/dev/fd0             /media/floppy        auto       noauto,user,sync      0 0
/dev/sdb5             /mnt/sdb5           ntfs       rw,users,umask=022    0 0

The part you're looking at is

Code:

/dev/sdb5             /mnt/sdb5        ntfs    rw,users,umask=022    0 0

/dev/sdb5 is my second SATA drive, the NTFS partition is located on the fifth partition which is an extended partition. Anything thing 5 and over is always extended, anything from 1 to 4 is primary (because you can only have 4 primary partition per hard drive). /mnt/sdb5 is my destination, this is where the file is place when it's mounted, that's where I made the directory first before I edited or mount the partition.

When you edit your fstab file, make sure to leave a space at the end of the file by pressing enter twice.

After that is save and done, just open up a shell, and type mount dev name, for my example I just type mount /dev/sdb5 and it'll search the fstab file. You won't have to do after you restart because it will auto mount for you. If you don't want it to auto mount just append noauto like this for example

Code:

/dev/sdb5             /mnt/sdb5        ntfs    noauto,rw,users,umask=022    0 0

But you'll have to always type mount dev name in the shell everytime.

Also, just make sure you're not copying my fstab example, because sdb5 is my partition and may not be the same as yours. That's what fdisk -l is for.

An example of my fdisk -l results

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9726 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        4870    39118243+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2   *        4871        6146    10249470   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            6147        9726    28756350    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            6147        8709    20587266    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6            8710        9726     8169021    7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           2       19457   156280320    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5               2       19265   154738048+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb6           19266       19457     1542208+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

King X13 · 10-16-2006, 07:17 AM

Thanks alot man im gonna give it a go, and i really apperciate the in depth response.

King X13 · 10-16-2006, 08:01 AM

ok so i i tried fdisk -l doest work for some reason, just drops down the prompt as if i just pressed enter, typed just fdisk and it gives me the usage list but cant get any of the info for some reason.

but i dont really need it cuz i know the partition i want is sdb5 so i get ready to edit the fstab with the info you said and i get more access denied you are not the owner. and the owner is root and the group is root. so i changed my main group to root for my user name and still no dice.

my own computer and i cant access anything lol. so how do i get permissions to edit the fstab? thanks.

Law · 10-16-2006, 11:37 AM

You have to be root. You don't want to change your users to the root group, there should only be 1 root account in that group. You want to leave a root account alone unless it's necessary to login to it and make changes. You can always su in as root from the shell but you'll have to be working in the shell using vim or vi or simply just login as root to the graphical desktop if you're not comfortable with the shell and open up kate and locate fstab in etc and edit it there.

What Linux distro are you using?

King X13 · 10-16-2006, 06:16 PM

ubuntu the latest one, root will not allow me to long on gui style, says "administrators can not log on this way"

personally im comfortable with anything as long as i have a way of figuring it out. i actually put it one computer aside at work and put ubuntu on my network for fun. by the way i like it much better then red hat a suse so far.

im gonna play around with it more and thanks a lot law for all your indepth help. if you have any tips or tricks it would be cool too.

King X13 · 10-16-2006, 07:16 PM

ok so i finally did it thanks to your help i have my 250 gig hard drive that ntfs mounted but when i double click it nothing happens.

Law · 10-17-2006, 07:09 AM

When you go locate it in /mnt? Where you mount the partition you can read it but not the /dev/sdb5 though. Not sure what you mean, try typing sudo mount into the shell and see if it's mounted first, than just remount it and see what happens.

sudo mount -o remount /dev/sdb5

Let me see the output when you do the mount command.

If my syntax for fstab doesn't work on your machine for some reason you can just simply change it to:

Code:

/dev/sdb5             /mnt/sdb5        ntfs    defaults    0 0

And remount it

sudo mount -o remount /dev/sdb5

Did you leave a space after the last line in the fstab file?

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