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I'm running Fedora 14 with the 2.6.35.13-92.fc14.i686 kernel and Gnome 2.32.0. I have a few NTFS drives that are mounted when I start up. However, there is no entry for them in fstab and nothing in mtab. (EDIT: The NTFS drives aren't in /proc/mounts either) Furthermore there is no mention of any NTFS filesystems in /etc/filesystems and /proc/filesystems.

FYI, all of the NTFS commands on my system are as follows:

# compgen -c | grep ntfs
ntfs-3g
ntfsmount
ntfsmftalloc
ntfs-3g.probe
ntfsdump_logfile
ntfsfix
ntfsdecrypt
ntfs-3g
ntfs-3g.secaudit
ntfs-3g.usermap
ntfsls
ntfscat
ntfstruncate
ntfswipe
ntfsmount
lowntfs-3g
ntfscmp
ntfsinfo
ntfsck
ntfscluster
ntfsmove
ntfslabel
mount.ntfs-3g
mount.ntfs
mount.lowntfs-3g
mkntfs
ntfscp
mkfs.ntfs
ntfsundelete
mount.ntfs-fuse
ntfsclone
ntfsresize

Questions:

  1. How does a Linux machine auto-mount an NTFS drive without looking at fstab?
  2. How is an NTFS drive mounted without NTFS being listed in either of the above to filesystem files?
  3. Why is there no mention of a mounted NTFS filesystem in mtab even though they're mounted on my system and browsable?
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You are probably using the ntfs-3g driver, which is a user mode filesystem. It will show up in /proc/mounts and /etc/mtab as fuse.

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  • I cat'ed out /proc/mounts and /etc/mtab and grep'ed for fuse. Indeed, there are several lines that reference fuse! Sweet! I looked into "user mode filesystem" AKA "Filesystem in User Space" (FUSE) which explains why NTFS is not directly mentioned in the /etc/filesystems or /proc/filesystems files. three mentions of FUSE are in /proc/filesystems however. It's beginning to make sense. =) – Wesley Aug 7 '11 at 5:03

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