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wpkzz

Member

Registered: 2020-01-10

Posts: 47

XFCE auto mount (hot mount?) external NTFS Drive

Hello fellow archers:

I am using ntfs-3g and I have this external ntfs hard drive, which, as far I can tell is a block device. I know that ntfs-3g doesn't allow users to mount such devices directly. The disk can be manually mounted as root from the terminal, without problems, and then appears nicely on Thunar, on the XFCE enviroment.
When I do not mount it manually as root, it appears on the icon list of drives on Thunar, its name correctly stated from its label. But when I double click it, it Thunar complains that it cannot be mounted as follows

 "Error mounting system managed device /dev/sdd1: unknown error when mounting /media/discoAnaPaula". 

I have been playing with the fstab entries, and at some point it did mount, but I do not recall what I did, but when I restarted the machine the magick was lost.
I would like that normal users, other than me, could simply plug their drives and not need to use "su,  mount" on the terminal to use NTFS drives, but it seems that it is quite difficult.
Here is my relevant line of fstab at this moment:

UUID=706E58A16E5861C0	/media/discoAnaPaula	ntfs-3g	noauto,user,rw,exec	0 0

Last edited by wpkzz (2022-12-12 01:12:31)

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Moyocoyani, Tloque Nahuaque.

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 887

Re: XFCE auto mount (hot mount?) external NTFS Drive

use gvfs and ntfs3, ntfs3 is far better than ntfs-3g and gvfs will allow you to mount it from thunar as regular user
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NTFS
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_m … ctionality

maboleth

Member

Registered: 2020-01-03

Posts: 230

Re: XFCE auto mount (hot mount?) external NTFS Drive

use gvfs and ntfs3, ntfs3 is far better than ntfs-3g and gvfs will allow you to mount it from thunar as regular user
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NTFS
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_m … ctionality

I did what you said and it works.

But how can I auto mount NTFS without fstab? My audio player is giving me the message after every boot that it failed to fetch the database (because it's on NTFS).

Update: I made a /fstab entry despite everything with Gnome disk app and now it's ok.

Last edited by maboleth (2023-01-12 22:24:30)

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 887

Re: XFCE auto mount (hot mount?) external NTFS Drive

you dont, fstab is for auto-mounting and gvfs is for hot plugging without having to use root to mount.

maboleth

Member

Registered: 2020-01-03

Posts: 230

Re: XFCE auto mount (hot mount?) external NTFS Drive

you dont, fstab is for auto-mounting and gvfs is for hot plugging without having to use root to mount.

Thanks. I had some big problems with fstab because whatever I tried (and I had many copy paste entries of the same drive) didn't work and broke the boot.

Finally I sorted it with Gnome Disks. Normally I always do fstab's manually, but I just didn't know what to do anymore.