NTFS-3G problem (was Re: OH DEAR)

[Jean-François Gagnon Laporte]

On 4/29/07, Maurice Murphy <m1625 at rogers.com> wrote:
> Hi Jean-François,
>
> Well, I'm back again with Feisty and am generally speaking very happy
> (my only other problem is my inability to install my webcam).  I tried
> your first possible solution to my removable disk problem without
> success.  I am reluctant to try your second solution for a couple of
> reasons: first as a newbie, I might muck things up and be unable to
> recover, more importantly, however, I don't think I'm getting to the
> root of the matter.
>
Well the solution I gave you earlier was because you said that the
name of the device node for your removable hard drive was constantly
changing. There is a tool available for testing out udev rules before
applying them so that could a testing ground for you if you wanted to
go that far.

> Why would Feisty complain that my removable drive needs to be checked?
> I have run it under Windows XP and given it a chkdsk, which it passes
> with flying colours.  In Ubuntu I have run ntfsfix on it and, again, all
> appears well, with lots of okays and a final statement of success.
>
It may be related to how ntfs-3G handles the partition.

> Yet this drive originally worked just fine under Edgy (not so now)
> without the need to 'force' mount it.  Can you think of any way that I
> could get around this?  My original line in fstab was:
>
> /dev/sdb5 /media/windows ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8
>
> and now is:
>
> /dev/sdb5 /media/windows ntfs-3g defaults,force 0 0
>
Seems fine I guess ... except it's still using an arbitrary device
node instead of it's uuid.

> The only thing I can think of doing is to reformat the removable drive,
> but since it contains ALL my valuable backup data, you can understand
> that I am most reluctant to do this, with the inherent need of copying
> everything to another ntfs drive, reformatting and then copying
> everything back again -- not a trivial task!  But I will do this as a
> last resort, if necessary.  What do you think?  I wouldn't blame you if
> something went wrong!
>
That won't change anything to the problem at hand so this solution
will be a waste of time for you :).

> Or do you think I should report this as a bug?  I can live with it, as I
> rarely turn off this computer, so it's no big deal :-)
>
>From the looks of it, you might want to review this page :

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountingWindowsPartitions/ThirdPartyNTFS3G

Have a look at it to see how they do it. From what I can see, it seems
to be related to how NTFS-3G handles your removable drive. The
approach I would use to fix your problem would be to :

 - First, search launchpad for bugs about NTFS-3G.
 - Second, if you didn't find something interesting or related I would
go directly to upstream's ressources pages like their forum and
mailing list. It seems pretty specific so they should have a better
idea than me.

Here's are a couple of links for them :

 * http://forum.ntfs-3g.org/
 * http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=ntfs-3g-devel
 * http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#questions

Good luck :)

Jean-François

> Many thanks for your help and advice,
>
> Maurice
>
> Jean-François Gagnon Laporte wrote:
> > Hi Maurice,
> >
> > On 4/27/07, Maurice Murphy <m1625 at rogers.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Well, I gave Feisty a real good try!  Unfortunately, it didn't like my
> >> HP removable drive in read/write mode.  Every time I did a reboot, it
> >> changed the address of this drive from /dev/sdb5 to /dev/sdc5 and vice
> >> versa requiring me to constantly change fstab.  As there seemed to be
> >> little other difference for me between Edgy and Feisty, I reinstalled
> >> the latter.
> >>
> > I can suggest two options for fixing this behavior that I would try in
> > order of complexity :
> >
> >  1 - Write your fstab so that it uses the uuid of the drive instead of
> > the device node. They are available here : ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/
> >
> >  2 - You could write an udev rule that would freeze your device name
> > to an arbitrary name of your choosing like "/dev/hpdrive". Here's a
> > link for a quick and well written howto by dsd :
> > http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html
> >
> > However, I find it odd that hal-dev-manager in gnome (I don't remember
> > the exact name of the daemon though) doesn't automatically mount your
> > removable drive without hacking your fstab.
> >
> > Hope this helps
> >
> >