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Joomla12

Member

Registered: 2012-04-25

Posts: 27

[Solved] Deleting Files From NTFS External

I know that this may have been answered in a previous thread, but I have yet to find it. Anyway, I use Thunar as my file manager, and yes, I have "gvfs" installed. The trash directory works properly for anything on /dev/sda, but /dev/sdb is an NTFS external drive, which hosts my personal content. I mount the drive to /run/media/<user>/Media in fstab, and have Documents, Pictures, etc. symlinked to /home/<user>. I know this is a bad practice, but I'm too lazy to backup 500+ GB of data so that I can properly mount it as my home directory as something that's a bit more Linux friendly (IE, formatting the drive as ext4). Plus I often switch between Linux and Windows depending on my nostalgia factor (I design textures for Nintendo64 ROMs, which unfortunately is easier on Windows with Project64, though this is irrelevant.) Anyway, when attempting to delete data from this drive, Thunar gives an error along the lines of "unable to create 'trash' directory". Holding Shift whilst deleting the files suffices (permanently deletes the files rather than moving them to Trash), but this is just a bit of a minor annoyance that is induced by my OCD. So, my question is, is there anything I can do? Files seem to be moved to "Trash" without issue from external flash drives formatted as fat32 and NTFS, but not this external drive.

Last edited by Joomla12 (2014-04-29 09:00:20)

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [Solved] Deleting Files From NTFS External

Have you googled the error message you're getting?
http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=6910
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1005346

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,722

Re: [Solved] Deleting Files From NTFS External

I know this is a bad practice, but I'm too lazy to backup 500+ GB of data ...

<ewaller slowly shakes his head waiting for the inevitable disaster to ensue.>

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clfarron4

Member

From: London, UK

Registered: 2013-06-28

Posts: 2,175

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Re: [Solved] Deleting Files From NTFS External

I had the exact same problem when I used symlinks to points on an ecryptfs filesystem in MATE.

My understanding of the situation is that if you access the (second) filesystem directly, it will shift everything to a .Trash-$UID on that drive. However, when you go through the symlinks, it tries to put deleted folders into a Trash folder on the drive that /home is on, not the second filesystem.

I'm not fussed by this anymore because I now use LVM on LUKS.

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Kopkins

Member

Registered: 2012-07-01

Posts: 189

Re: [Solved] Deleting Files From NTFS External

EDIT: Try reading through those other posts, I think this might have more to do with the file manager than what I said.

Is ntfs-3g installed?

pacman -Q ntfs-3g

If it's not installed I don't think you can write to an NTFS drive.

Try pacman -S ntfs-3g, reboot, then try again.

Last edited by Kopkins (2014-04-27 20:49:34)

Joomla12

Member

Registered: 2012-04-25

Posts: 27

Re: [Solved] Deleting Files From NTFS External

<ewaller slowly shakes his head waiting for the inevitable disaster to ensue.>

Well, I don't particularly have anywhere else to back it up to either. Though I suppose I could get right on compressing stuff...heh.

Is ntfs-3g installed?

Of course it is.

I'm gonna try changing around my fstab to see if that helps.

Edit: Yup, just needed to be mounted properly. Marking as solved. If anyone else runs into this, just add [...uid=<id>,gid=<id>...] to your fstab. Ensure you're apart of wheel as well.

Last edited by Joomla12 (2014-04-29 09:01:42)