NTFS: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:18, 20 October 2022

Enable NTFS support

boot.supportedFilesystems = [ "ntfs" ];

NixOS uses NTFS-3G for NTFS support.

Enable write mode

  fileSystems."/path/to/mount/to" =
    { device = "/path/to/the/device";
      fsType = "ntfs3"; 
      options = [ "rw" "uid=theUidOfYourUser"];
    };

Troubleshooting

Read-only file system

This is most likely caused by Windows not marking the disk as "clean" and unmounted.

To verify:

journalctl -b0 | grep -i "The disk contains an unclean file system"

It should return a similar message to what follows:

The disk contains an unclean file system (0,0). Metadata
kept in Windows cache, refused to mount. Falling back to
read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an unsafe
state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no
hibernation or fast restarting.)

If you have shutdown Windows fully, and not used hibernation, it may be caused by the fast startup or fast boot feature of Windows. It has been reported that major Windows updates may reset this setting to on.

This TechNet entry explains how to disable fast startup. Additionally, this blog post on howtogeek.com explains what is the fast startup mode, and how to disable it.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 == Enable NTFS support ==
 <syntaxHighlight lang=nix>
-boot.supportedFilesystems = [ "ntfs3" ];
+boot.supportedFilesystems = [ "ntfs" ];
 </syntaxHighlight>
@@ Line 10: / Line 10: @@
    fileSystems."/path/to/mount/to" =
      { device = "/path/to/the/device";
-       fsType = "ntfs";
+       fsType = "ntfs3";
        options = [ "rw" "uid=theUidOfYourUser"];
      };