How to mount NTFS Windows XP filesystem on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
A friend of mine bring home a
Seagate External Hard Disk Drive using USB 3 as a communication media. I needed to attach the hard disk to my FreeBSD router to transfer him some data, the External HDD is formatted to use NTFS as a main file partition and hence to make the file transfers I had to somehow mount the NTFS partition on the HDD.
FreeBSD and other BSDs, just like Linux does not have embedded NTFS file system mount support.
In order to add an external write support for the plugged hdd NTFS I looked in the ports tree:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports
freebsd# make search name='ntfs'
Port: fusefs-ntfs-2010.10.2
Path: /usr/ports/sysutils/fusefs-ntfs
Info: Mount NTFS partitions (read/write) and disk images
Maint: ports@FreeBSD.org
B-deps: fusefs-libs-2.7.4 libiconv-1.13.1_1 libtool-2.4 libublio-20070103 pkg-config-0.25_1
R-deps: fusefs-kmod-0.3.9.p1.20080208_7 fusefs-libs-2.7.4 libiconv-1.13.1_1 libublio-20070103 pkg-config-0.25_1
WWW: http://www.tuxera.com/community/
Port: ntfsprogs-2.0.0_1
Path: /usr/ports/sysutils/ntfsprogs
Info: Utilities and library to manipulate NTFS partitions
Maint: ports@FreeBSD.org
B-deps: fusefs-libs-2.7.4 libiconv-1.13.1_1 libublio-20070103 pkg-config-0.25_1
R-deps: libublio-20070103 pkg-config-0.25_1
WWW: http://www.linux-ntfs.org/
freebs# cd sysutils/fusefs-ntfs/
freebsd# ls
Makefile distinfo files/ pkg-descr pkg-plist
freebsd# cat pkg-descr
The ntfs-3g driver is an open source, freely available read/write NTFS
driver, which provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows
Server 2003 and Windows 2000 filesystems. Almost the full POSIX filesystem
functionality is supported, the major exceptions are changing the file
ownerships and the access rights.
WWW: http://www.tuxera.com/community/
Using
ntfs-3g I managed to succeed
mounting the NTFS on my old PC running FreeBSD ver. 7_2
1. Installing fuserfs-ntfs support on BSD
Before I can use
ntfs-3g, to mount the paritition, I had to install
fuserfs-ntfs bsd port, with:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/fusefs-ntfs
freebsd# make install clean
.....
I was curious if
ntfsprogs provides other utilities to do the ntfs mount but whilst trying to install it I realized it is already installed as a dependency package to
fusefs-ntfs.
fusefs-ntfs package provides a number of
utilities for creating, mounting, fixing and doing various manipulations with Microsoft NTFS filesystems.
Here is a list of all the executable
utilities helpful in NTFS fs management:
freebsd# pkg_info -L fusefs-ntfs\* | grep -E "/bin/|/sbin|README"
/usr/local/bin/lowntfs-3g
/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g
/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g.probe
/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g.secaudit
/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g.usermap
/usr/local/bin/ntfscat
/usr/local/bin/ntfscluster
/usr/local/bin/ntfscmp
/usr/local/bin/ntfsfix
/usr/local/bin/ntfsinfo
/usr/local/bin/ntfsls
/usr/local/sbin/mkntfs
/usr/local/sbin/ntfsclone
/usr/local/sbin/ntfscp
/usr/local/sbin/ntfslabel
/usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize
/usr/local/sbin/ntfsundelete
/usr/local/share/doc/ntfs-3g/README
/usr/local/share/doc/ntfs-3g/README.FreeBSD
The
README and
README.FreeBSD are wonderful, reading for those who want to get more in depth knowledge on using the up-listed utilities.
One utility, worthy to mention, I have used in the past is
ntfsfix.
ntfsfix resolve issues with NTFS partitions which were not unmounted on system shutdown (electricity outage), system hang up etc.
2. Start fusefs (ntfs) and configure it to auto load on system boot
Once
fuserfs-ntfs is installed, if its necessery
ntfs fs mounts to be permanently supported on the BSD system add
fusefs_enable="YES" to
/etc/rc.conf -
(the FreeBSD services auto load conf).
freebsd# echo 'fusefs_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf
One note to make here is that you need to have also
dbus_enable="YES" and
hald_enable="YES" in
/etc/rc.conf, not having this two in rc.conf will prevent fusefs to start properly. Do a quick grep to make sure this two variables are enabled:
Afterwards
fsusefs load up script should be run:
freebsd# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/fusefs start
Starting fusefs.
Another alternative way to load ntfs support on the BSD host is to directly load
fuse.ko kernel module:
freebsd# /sbin/kldload fuse.ko
3. Mounting the NTFS partition
In my case, the Seagate hard drive was detected as
da0, where the NTFS partition was detected as
s1 (da0s1):
freebsd# dmesg|grep -i da0
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 953869MB (1953525164 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 121601C)br />
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0s1 is ntfs/Expansion Drive.
GEOM_LABEL: Label for provider da0s1 is ntfs/Expansion Drive.
Therefore further to mount it one can use
mount_ntfs (to quickly mount in read only mode) or
ntfs-3g for (read / write mode):
If you need to just quickly mount a disk drive to copy some data and umount it with no need for writting to the NTFS partition do;
freebsd# /sbin/mount_ntfs /dev/ad0s1 /mnt/disk
Note that
mount_ntfs command is a native BSD command and have nothing to do with
ntfs-3g. Therefore using it to mount NTFS is not the same as mounting it via
ntfs-3g cmd
freebsd# /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g -o rw /dev/da0s1 /mnt/disk/
Something, I've noticed while using
ntfs-3g is, it fails to properly exit even when the ntfs-3g shell execution is over:
freebsd# ps ax |grep -i ntfs|grep -v grep
18892 ?? Is 0:00.00 /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g -o rw /dev/da0s1 /mnt/disk/
I dunno if this is some kind of ntfs-3g bug or feature specific to all versions of FreeBSD or it is something local to FBSD 7.2
Thought
ntfs-3g, keeps appearing in process list, praise God as of time of writting NTFS support on FreeBSD prooved to be stable.
Read / Write disk operations to the NTFS I tested it with works great. Just about 5 years ago I still remember write mode was still experimental. Now it seems NTFS mounts can be used with no hassle even on production machines.
4. Auto mounting NTFS partition on FreeBSD system boot
There are two approaches towards 'the problem' I can think of.
The better way to auto mount on boot (in my view) is through
/etc/fstab use
If /etc/fstab + ntfs-3g is to be used, you will however change the default
/sbin/mount_ntfs command to point to
/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g, i.e.:
freebsd# mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig
freebsd# ln -s /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /sbin/mount_ntfs
Then to mount
/dev/da0s1 via
/etc/fstab add line:
/dev/ad0s1 /mnt/disk ntfs rw,late 0 0
To not bother with text editor run:
freebsd# echo '/dev/ad0s1 /mnt/disk ntfs rw,late 0 0' >> /etc/fstab
I've red in posts in freebsd forums, there is also a way to use
ntfs-3g for mounting partitions, without substituting the original bsd
/sbin/mount_ntfs, the exact commands suggested to be used with no need to prior
mv /sbin/mount_ntfs to /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig and link it to ntfs is:
/dev/ad0s1 /disk ntfs rw,mountprog=/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g,late 0 0
For any
other NTFS partitions, for instance
/dev/ad0s2, /dev/ad2s1 etc. simply change the parititon name and
mount points.
The second alternative to adding the NTFS to auto mount is through
/etc/rc.local.
/etc/rc.local content will be executed very late in system boot. :
echo '/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g -o rw /dev/da0s1' >> /etc/rc.local
One disadvanage of using /etc/rc.local for mounting the partition is the hanging
ntfs-3g in proc list:
freebsd# ps ax |grep -i ntfs|grep -v grep
18892 ?? Is 0:00.00 /usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g -o rw /dev/da0s1 /mnt/disk/
Though, I haven't tested it yet. Using the same methodology should be perfectly working on
PC-BSD, DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
I will be glad if someone who runs any of the other BSDs can confirm, following this instructions works fine on these BSDs too.