How Do I Access or Mount Windows/USB NTFS Partition in RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

Sometimes it may happens in some stage, you may have to access data on a Windows partition, USB device or any similar device. Today most of the modern Linux systems automatically recognize and mount any disks.

However, in some occasions where you may required to configure your system manually to mount ntfs partitions on your Linux system. Specially when you are using dual boot operating environment. Fortunately, this process is not so complicated task its just very fairly straight forward.

This article explains you on how to access or mount Windows XP, Vista NTFS or USB filesystem using the ‘mount‘ command in RHEL/CentOS/Fedora systems.

How to Mount Windows NTFS Partition in Linux

First you need to enable EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) Repository. You may refer the article on how to enable EPEL Repository under RHEL, CentOS and Fedora systems.

To mount any NTFS based filesystem, you need to install a tool called NTFS3G. Before heading up for installation let’s understand NTGS3G.

What is NTFS3G

NTFS3G is an open source cross-platform, stable, GPL licensed, POSIX, NTFS R/W driver used in Linux. It provides safe handling of Windows NTFS file systems viz create, remove, rename, move files, directories, hard links, etc.

Once EPEL is installed and enabled, let’s install ntfs-3g package using the below command with root user.

# yum -y install ntfs-3g

Fuse Install

Next, install and load FUSE driver to mount detected devices with below command. FUSE module is included in the kernel itself in version 2.6.18-164 or newer.

# yum install fuse
# modprobe fuse

Identify NTFS Partition

Once fuse module is loaded, type below command to find out NTFS Partitions in Linux.

# fdisk -l

 Device Boot      Start    End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1         1	   21270    7816688   b  W95 FAT32

Mount NTFS partition

First create a mount point to mount the NTFS partition.

# mkdir /mnt/nts

Simply run the following command to mount the partition. Replace sda1 with your actual partition found.

# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/nts

Once it’s mounted on /mnt/ntfs, you may use regular Linux ls -l command to list the content of mounted filesystem.

[[email protected] ntfs]# ls -l
total 27328
drwx------.  2 root root    16384 Sep  2 19:37 Cert
drwx------. 20 root root    16384 Aug 24  2011 club_application
drwx------.  6 root root    16384 Aug 11 15:37 docs
drwx------.  7 root root    16384 Jul 31  2012 Downloads
drwx------.  2 root root    16384 Dec 10 20:28 images
-rwxr-xr-x.  1 root root    31744 Jan 18 00:29 Material List.doc

If you want to make mount point permanent at the boot time, then simple add the following line at the end of /etc/fstab file. This will remain as permanent.

/dev/sda1    /mnt/usb    ntfs-3g        defaults    0    0

Umount NTFS Partition

Simply, use the following command to unmount the mounted partition.

# umount /mnt/usb

Read Also : How to Mount ISO Images in Linux