Mount NTFS external drive in Ubuntu

This post if for anyone looking to mount an external NTFS drive with read and write capability. This is particularly handy if you’re trying to use a Windows formatted external drive on Ubuntu.

There are two things you will need to note throughout this tutorial: drive point and mount point. The drive point is where the external drive will be located and the mount point is where we’d like to access it for regular usage.

First we need to install the read/write ntfs package

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Next, we need to find the usb drive point that we want to mount

sudo fdisk -l | grep NTFS

The response should look similar below. Here we want to note the drive point; in our case: /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1 1 243201 1953512001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Once we have that, we need to create our mount point, this can be what or where ever you want

sudo mkdir /media/hdd1

Now we can mount our drive point to our mount point

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/hdd1

Now you’re good to go! You should be able to access your external drive through the mount point you created.

If you want to automount on bootup (so you don’t have to manually remount after every reboot), we need to append the following line to /etc/fstab

/dev/sdb1 /media/hdd1 ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0

If you ever need to unmount

sudo umount /media/hdd1

Originally published at seanwragg.com on March 18, 2010.