Permission denied when writing on NTFS mount, even as root

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 1 comments

Published on October 18th 2018 - Listed in Linux Windows

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To create an offsite backup, I plugged an external hard drive via USB to my home NAS server. The external hdd has one partition and is formatted with NTFS (to allow create some backups from Windows hosts, too).

I mounted the partition to /mnt2 and wanted to sync the data from NAS, but it failed:

# rsync -rtuP /mnt/data/Movies/ /mnt2/Movies/
sending incremental file list
Test1.mp4
  1,956,669,762 100%  108.73MB/s    0:00:17 (xfr#1, to-chk=1040/1042)
Test2.mp4
    436,338,688  20%  104.03MB/s    0:00:16  ^C
rsync error: received SIGINT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP (code 20) at rsync.c(638) [sender=3.1.1]
rsync: mkstemp "/mnt2/Movies/.Test1.mp4.mwuEtR" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: mkstemp "/mnt2/Movies/.Test2.mp4.ialsVx" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync error: received SIGINT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP (code 20) at io.c(504) [generator=3.1.1]

Permissions were correct, at least that root was able to write:

# ls -l /mnt2
total 20M
drwx------ 1 root root    0 Jan  2  2018 Family
drwsr-sr-x 1 root root 232K Oct 14 20:00 Movies
drwx------ 1 root root  24K Dec 30  2017 Movies-Kids
drwx------ 1 root root    0 May  6  2017 Pictures

But when I tried to manually create a file, permission denied again:

# touch /mnt2/bla
touch: cannot touch ‘bla’: Permission denied

I checked dmesg and saw the following:

[12867539.697380] ntfs: (device sde1): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
[12867539.697386] ntfs: (device sde1): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
[12867539.697392] ntfs: (device sde1): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.

I checked how the partition was mounted:

# mount | grep sde1
/dev/sde1 on /mnt2 type ntfs (rw,relatime,uid=0,gid=0,fmask=0177,dmask=077,nls=utf8,errors=continue,mft_zone_multiplier=1)

"rw is there so it should work", would be my first guess. But I remembered that NTFS mounts are a little bit special on Linux.

In order to "really" mount a NTFS drive and write on it, one needs the ntfs-3g package, which uses fuse in the background.
Note: I wrote a similar article but for MAC OS X back in 2011: How to read and write an NTFS external disk on a MAC OS X.

I installed the package which installed fuse as a dependency:

# apt-get install ntfs-3g
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  fuse
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  fuse ntfs-3g

Now I just needed to unmount the external hdd and mount it with ntfs-3g:

# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sde1 /mnt2

Checking mount again, the partition is now mounted as type fuseblk:

# mount | grep sde1
/dev/sde1 on /mnt2 type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096)

And voilà, I can now write to the NTFS partition:

# touch /mnt2/bla && stat /mnt2/bla
  File: ‘/mnt2/bla’
  Size: 0             Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   regular empty file
Device: 841h/2113d    Inode: 16406       Links: 1
Access: (0777/-rwxrwxrwx)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2018-10-18 20:29:45.914775500 +0200
Modify: 2018-10-18 20:29:45.914775500 +0200
Change: 2018-10-18 20:29:45.914775500 +0200
 Birth: -

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Comments (newest first)

Bukowa from wrote on Oct 28th, 2022:

Thank you :)

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