Mounting NTFS

This page is available for historical record, but no longer relevant to our environments.

To mount NTFS USB drives under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5:

• Log into GNOME.

• Right-click on the desktop and select "Open Terminal". The UNIX shell terminal window will be needed for most steps.

• Insert the USB drive into the computer (if it is a hard disk, make sure it is powered-on).

• GNOME will automatically mount the drive, but it will be read-only. If there is no need for write-access to the drive, then the remaining steps will not be performed.

• In the terminal window, type

 df -k

• The output will look something like this:

 Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
 /dev/sda1             74315464  13084632  57394916  19% /
 /dev/sda6               505604     52947    426553  12% /afscache
 tmpfs                  2040284         0   2040284   0% /dev/shm
 AFS                    9000000         0   9000000   0% /afs
 /dev/sdb1               247788     22720    225068  10% /media/VolumeName

• The import line to pay attention to is the USB drive that is currently mounted in the /media directory. The Volume Name of the USB drive will be whatever was used when the drive was formatted. The first column (labeled Filesystem) is the USB drive device. This device name will be needed later in the instructions.

• This is unintuitive, but the USB drive will need to be unmounted from GNOME, but keep the drive plugged into the computer. To unmount the drive, Select Places > Computer. The Computer window will open. Right-click on the USB drive and select "Unmount Volume".

• In the terminal window, you will want to manually mount the USB drive. The mount point is going to be /mnt (if multiple USB drives are to be attached, each one has to have a unique mount point--the quick and dirty way to make a new mount point is to make a new directory in /tmp [and use that instead of /mnt --the mount point name would then have to written fully out such as /tmp/DirectoryName ). The device name will be whatever was listed in the df output for the USB drive. The command and its arguments are:

 $ mount <dev-name> /mnt

To unmount the USB drive, make sure you type in the terminal window:

 $ /bin/fusermount -u /mnt