Arch Linux

Cknight70

Member

Registered: 2018-01-24

Posts: 76

[SOLVED] Fstab: home folder not auto mounting on ntfs-3g

Hi, I've been trying to figure out why this hasn't been working for a while:
I have my var and my home folder on my ntfs hard drive. I'm using ntfs-3g. My var doesn't seem to have any problems auto mounting, but I have to sign into root and unmount/remount my home folder for it to work correctly. After that everything works perfectly.

Here's the contents of my fstab file

# /dev/nvme0n1p6
UUID=8cf138a0-f32d-4937-a30a-b0f02aa41c42	/         	ext4      	rw,relatime,data=ordered	0 1

# /dev/nvme0n1p2
UUID=5246-9FDF      	/boot     	vfat      	rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro	0 2

# /dev/sda1 LABEL=As\134x20in\134x20Dog
UUID=B21EAA1C1EA9DA1D	/hdd      	ntfs-3g      	rw,nodev,relatime,uid=connor,gid=users,allow_other,blksize=4096	0 1

# /mnt/hdd/var
/mnt/hdd/var        	/var      	none      	rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,gid=users,allow_other,umask=0022,blksize=4096,bind	0 0

# /mnt/hdd/Home
/mnt/hdd/Home       /home/connor	none      	rw,nodev,relatime,uid=connor,gid=users,allow_other,blksize=4096,bind	0 0

(If you see something else off, or a bad practice in my fstab feel free to point it out haha)

Using the Arch installer, I used ls -a to verify the /var and /home/connor were empty on my ext4 partition.

Last edited by Cknight70 (2018-02-13 19:58:43)

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,362

Re: [SOLVED] Fstab: home folder not auto mounting on ntfs-3g

Having your home folder on ntfs is generally a bad practice. It does work (I've done it before) but I'd start with fixing that.

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Cknight70

Member

Registered: 2018-01-24

Posts: 76

Re: [SOLVED] Fstab: home folder not auto mounting on ntfs-3g

I can understand that, seeing as I found out I don't have permissions to edit the files made from Arch when I boot into Windows without special configuration.
The reason i want them on NTFS is so that I can use one partition shared with Windows including my photos, music, etc. Also this way I would not need to worry about running out of space space on one partition or another.
I trust ntfs-3g more than whatever hack I'm likely to find in Windows, so if it is possible please humor me on this.
But I will test making another ext4 partition and binding my home directory to a folder in the same kind of way for the sake of testing tomorrow if no one has any ideas.

Last edited by Cknight70 (2018-02-13 06:52:58)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Fstab: home folder not auto mounting on ntfs-3g

Several applications will potentially give you problems on ntfs drives. Just do that share your music and your documents on the ntfs drive but keep the home partition on an UNIX filesystem. And we aren't talking about Windows permission problems here, that is the easiest to fix. A lot of linux programs store user configuration and might check permissions before doing any changes.

The actual "problem" here is that the automatic mount is being done as root, which will lead to the mount point (and the files therein, from the POV of a file permission read) being owned by root, which will lead to issues, if you do it manually since you are the one mounting, your user will be the owner of the mount point and all the files will look like they belong to your user. However these permissions are transient and are only kept to not break linux programs that check for these, you can't make them properly persistent.

Last edited by V1del (2018-02-13 10:07:45)

Cknight70

Member

Registered: 2018-01-24

Posts: 76

Re: [SOLVED] Fstab: home folder not auto mounting on ntfs-3g

I appreciate you explaining that to me. I decided to take your, ngoonee, and the advice of people I've read while looking into this issue and put my home folder on another partition before I accidentally learn the hard way.

While I was doing, this I found out the actual reason for my problem is that I had pointed to /mnt/hdd/Home instead of just /hdd/Home. I changed that and now I don't have to re-mount in the root account. I guess I was too focused on making sure there was a capital H in the file name to notice this bonehead mistake. Yes I had copied my var folder to /mnt/hdd/var too. Anyways thank you for helping me notice my glaring mistake. With this, I can say Arch is running without any problems

Last edited by Cknight70 (2018-02-13 20:26:08)