External drive - write permission

[quancode]

Hi,
I have an external USB drive which I can read from but I dont get to write to it. I've read other places on modifying fstab but apprently it dosn't work for me.

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda1 /media/hda1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
#/dev/sda5 /media/sda5 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
/dev/sda5 /media/sda5 ntfs rw,auto,user,umask=007,gid=46 0 0
/dev/hda6 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

the drive that i am talking about is "sda5".

Thanks for your help.

[podunk]

Re: External drive - write permission

First of all - you do know that the

#

tells the program to "skip everything after this"? So when you have that at the start of an entry the program skips it entirely.

Second - Linux doesn't write to ntfs drives by itself, you need a driver that is beta. If it were me I would copy my data and reformat the drive to fat 32. That would make life very easy and safe.

[kubicle]

Re: External drive - write permission

As podunk pointed out, you should not enable writing on ntfs with the default ntfs driver, it may lead to serious data corruption.

If you really need to write on ntfs, you can use the ntfs-3g driver (the 'beta' driver podunk mentioned)...Unless you have absolutely critical (and not backed up) data on your drive (of course you should always have back ups of critical data )

If you're running edgy, you can installl ntfs-3g from ubuntu 'universe' repository (which you may need to enable)...and mount with it by editing fstab to use ntfs-3g instead of ntfs.

Side notes:

/dev/sda5      /media/sda5     ntfs   rw,auto,user,umask=007,gid=46 0 0

Hmm...I can't see why this wouldn't 'work' in principal (but remember you shouldn't enable writing with ntfs)...have you remounted it after editing fstab?

/dev/hda1       /media/hda1     ntfs    defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0       1

You should not enable filesystem checks at boot with non-linux filesystems, so the final number '1' should be changed to '0'