Tech

CentOS 5 mount NTFS usb drive

by Phyllis · May 4, 2012

To find the device name for the plugged in USB drive , use “/bin/dmesg” command and check the device name for usb storage device .
Or simply use the command “ls -alt /dev ” to check for the most updated device file. In my case , it’s “/dev/sdi1”

Check the System Type :

# fdisk -l /dev/sdi

Disk /dev/sdi: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdi1 1 121601 976760001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Use the ” mount -t ntfs ” command to mount the usb device , it will result in below error message :

# mount -t ntfs /dev/sdi1 /mnt
mount: unknown filesystem type ‘ntfs’

Download and Install ntfs-3g and fuse , or if you have epel repositories (like me) , simply install by :

yum install ntfs-3g ntfs-3g-devel
yum install fuse fuse-devel fuse-libs

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a loadable kernel module for Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the FUSE module provides only a “bridge” to the actual kernel interfaces. Ref

Now mount the usb hard disk :

#/sbin/mount.ntfs-3g /dev/sdi1 /mnt/

Special Note : CentOS 5 does not have EFI support , so you cannot mount an NTFS USB drive larger than 2TB which has GPT partition table . Check File System Type :

# fdisk -l /dev/sdi
WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on ‘/dev/sdi’! The util fdisk doesn’t support GPT. Use GNU Parted.
Note: sector size is 4096 (not 512)
WARNING: The size of this disk is 3.0 TB (3000592982016 bytes).
DOS partition table format can not be used on drives for volumes
larger than 2.2 TB (2199023255040 bytes). Use parted(1) and GUID
partition table format (GPT).

Disk /dev/sdi: 3000.5 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 45422 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16128 * 4096 = 66060288 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdi1 1 266306 4294967292 ee EFI GPT

Refererence : Ref1