Sunday, March 4, 2012

unprivileged user cannot mount ntfs block devices

I was trying to view the contents of my external hard drive in Debian Wheezy. The HD is formatted in NTFS from my Windows/Linux dual booting days. It's 500GB and more than half full, and my laptop HD is only 80GB, so pulling the data off and reformatting is not an option. The error message gave several suggested solutions, none of which I knew how to implement. Fortunately I spotted this post mentioning /etc/fstab. Commenting out the USB drive entry meant I could access the disk. I'd had exactly the same problem after installing Squeeze from a USB drive, although with a different error message: it seems installing from a USB leaves and entry in /etc/fstab that will prevent an external HD from mounting.

1 comment:

  1. This solved my problem on Wheezy. I'd swapped in an SSD for the mech on my laptop and put it in an external enclosure. A fresh install of Wheezy from a thumbdrive wouldn't mount the NTFS partitions on the old drive but it would mount the EXT ones. Commenting out the USB lines in fstab solved the problem. Thanks for posting!

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