Cannot automount external NTFS drive

General system Newbie
1

I have a 1 TB sandisk external drive,
san

I use for my truck music. Its simply music I place on drive. Problem is EOS will not open drive. My head unit requires Fat32, or Ex Fat, but either or. It don’t matter. When I try, I get:
undrv
OK. Apparently Something inst quite right. I can accept that. What perturbs me is I can connect the same drive to a Pop OS system, and it has no problem reading drive. This is the only reason why I keep Pop OS on my laptop. After thinking about it I come to the conclusion that I appreciate the variances. If one doesn’t work I try another. Ultimately the goal is met, and one can move on. My only regret is EOS has problem with a drive that another OS doesn’t.

2

This is quite strange. What does your partition manager in EOS say about this external drive?

3

Partition Manager? Not sure what you mean? I do not have a dedicated partition manager, but gparted shows no errors.

gparted
gparted780×710 107 KB

4

GParted is a partition manager, to my knowledge. Interesting that it doesn’t show anythin- The file system is NTFS. I wonder if that is somehow related…

5

This is NTFS though, not FAT-something.

Could be 3.2 Unable to mount with ntfs3 with partition marked dirty.

6

Well its an ntfs partion table. It’s a known issue that you’ll have to mount it explicitly.

7

Yea. I forgot it was ntfs :face_with_diagonal_mouth:. Interesting that ntfs is causing the problems it is though. I ll have to dink around with ntfsfix now. Thankyou for the heads up.

8

It s Interestingly though. Addressing the fact that Pop OS opens the drive without any hesitation when EOS precludes any movement forward begs questions…though I can already guess where that line of reasoning will go…

9

Basically NTFS under Linux isn’t really a good idea. It’s one of those ‘your mileage may vary’ things.

1 Like
10

Thunar is able to mount an ntfs partition/drive automatically.

It’s not, but can you mount an ext4 or other FS automatically ?

11

I tend to disagree. ntfs3 driver is mature enough for daily operations, and constantly being improved. You will not get super performance, and there are some caveats, but I don’t know about nothing which would justify opinion “bad idea”. Source: I use it daily for one year.

12

Unless you plan on using a drive with a Windows environment at any point, there’s no reason to use NTFS (and even then, ExFAT is a more universally useful format - I have yet to find a device that supports NTFS but not ExFAT, and own many, many devices that specifically require FAT32/ExFAT rather than NTFS).

2 Likes
13

But this is the only use case you want to use NTFS - for interoperability with Windows. And this is exactly my case.

14

Yes, till you get a dirty filesystem and have to use a native Windows installation to fix it. It doesn’t play nicely. Or you get a corrupted filesystem…

15

I tend to disagree. While it is mature enough to use and to my knowledge is developed by Microsoft themselves, if you use NTFS somewhere, it is likely because you have Windows installed. Reading and writing to a file system and booting up from it will very likely get you into problems at some point, sooner or later. It has happened to me before and I had to re-install Windows because of it.

16

to me a serious reason to refrain from…

1 Like