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nLEyETn

Member

Registered: 2008-10-01

Posts: 34

[SOLVED] Missing Filenames That Have Foreign Characters in NTFS-3G

I have a partition mounted that contains filenames with foreign characters such as: é The problem is I cannot see any of the files that contain these types of characters.  I'm really not familiar with the Locale settings and how all this works, but from what I've read already I've tried a couple of things.

This is what is in my rc.conf file

LOCALE="en_US.utf8"
HARDWARECLOCK="localtime"
USEDIRECTISA="no"
TIMEZONE="US/Mountain"
KEYMAP="us"
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR="yes"

I'm not sure what all the en_US.utf8 locale contains as far as character maps, but in case ntfs-3g wasn't reading it right I tried mounting the drive with the following options:

mount -o locale=en_US.utf8 -t ntfs-3g

I also then tried enabling more locales in my locale.gen file.  I went through the whole file uncommenting all the utf8 locales.  I ran locale-gen after that, but this didn't have any affect either.  I read on the ntfs-3g website that sometimes the mount happens to early in the bootup when the locales haven't been setup yet, so I tried unmounting and remounting it after the system was completely up.

Nothing I've tried yet seems to affect it.  Can anybody help me figure out how to make it work?

Last edited by nLEyETn (2008-11-15 22:43:06)

R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: [SOLVED] Missing Filenames That Have Foreign Characters in NTFS-3G

I guess there is no easy way around that, the chars were written with another locale codepage so when you use utf8 they don't show properly, if you change your locale to the proper codepage them most probably you will break the filenames written in utf8. That happened to me, most notably when transferring files from windows (from flash disks or the likes), while using linux everything work very well if I use utf8 locales.

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

nLEyETn

Member

Registered: 2008-10-01

Posts: 34

Re: [SOLVED] Missing Filenames That Have Foreign Characters in NTFS-3G

Thanks for the reply.  I was afraid there wouldn't be an easy solution but I continued to look around for any info on it.  It seems it is a limitation in the ntfs-3g driver.  Fortunately the problem has been fixed in a seperate release of the ntfs-3g code.  I first found where the maintainer mentioned it in this thread http://forum.ntfs-3g.org/viewtopic.php?t=1008.  Which points to the page that has the source code available http://pagesperso-orange.fr/b.andre/security.html.  It looks like the main purpose of that release is to implement some synchronization between the security in Windows and Linux.  That actually turned out to be a very nice bonus find for me while looking for the character handling fix.

Anyway I'm not sure if this will be maintained as a seperate fork of ntfs-3g or if it will be implemented into the main branch after a period of testing.  At any rate I'm not waiting for that to happen , so I went ahead and built a custom package for my system with the new code and it works great.  If anybody else wants to use this solution, I want to remind you that this is not an official stable release so use at your own discretion.  As the maintainer mentions on his website:

"The available packages are extensions to recent standard versions. They have been careful tested and they pass standard tests, nevertheless problems may have crept in, so you should backup your valuable data."

They are working great for me so far though.