So I have a USB drive formatted in NTFS and I have problems when mounting it on my eos machine. When I plug it in, the context menu opens and I click the mount device button, but it doesn’t work.
However when I open terminal and do “mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda $HOME/media” it works fine, it’s just annoying having to do it every time.
How can I fix it?
Give us some in formations about your system. Especially the DE and file manager you are using. You most likely are missing an optional package for your file manager.
Sorry,
I use KDE Plasma 6 and Dolphin.
I have a fresh install and didn’t install to many additional packages yet.
After posting this thread I found in journal, that the usb is marked as “dirty” whatever that means, hope it’s helpful.
Try installing the ntfs-3g package.
Other than that I found this, although it won’t help much if you have no Windows PC.
Edit: Fixed wrong link.
Also check the arch wiki about dirty volumes. It suggests to use
ntfsfix --clear-dirty /dev/sdX
Or simply try running
ntfsfix /dev/sdX
I don’t take responsibility for the well being of your NTFS drive, though 
I already installed ntfs-3g and it didn’t work.
I was trying to find a solution that won’t require windows, because, even that I have windows machine, it’s my home PC, and I’m out right now.
However I realised that I have windows virtual machine and tried it there.
It worked so far, thank you so much for help and sorry for wasting your time instead of just googling a bit.
No problem. It’s always good to know this stuff anyway. NTFS drives give people more headaches than one might think.
What would be good replacement for ntfs? I was thinking about FAT32, but from what I know they have a limit of maximum 4GB files. I stayed with ntfs because of that limit and the fact I need a filesystem that works on windows with no problem.
For Linux systems you should run EXT4 IMHO.
With that said it also depends on your needs some say BTRFS is the way to go. (do to snapshots and stuff to get the system back to an earlier working state). So it depends on your needs.
Just make sure to backup everything on the drive before attempting any change.
If you need your drive to read/write on Windows, NTFS is the best choice. Other than that anything that is built into the Linux kernel.
There are programs that allow you to read other file systems under Windows, but it’s probably more of a hassle than just using NTFS.
I also always use ext4.
You could use exFAT. Supports files up to 128PB (iirc) and works almost everywhere.
Yeah I always use exFAT on an USB Drive works great.
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