Cannot chown, chmod on mounted ntfs partition

Question

I need to mount a ntfs partition and be able to use it with unix file system permissions. The problem is that, when I mount the partition using the following fstab entry, I cannot run chown and chmod successfully. It executes without error, but the file access rights are not changed.

PARTUUID=c3e3b171-d451-44e6-9f17-ffbe9e220dc7   /mnt/mounted_drive  ntfs-3g  defaults,umask=0022,uid=1000,gid=1000,errors=remount-ro,permissions 0 2

When I mount the partition without setting umask, uid, and gid I can use previously mentioned commands successfully.

PARTUUID=c3e3b171-d451-44e6-9f17-ffbe9e220dc7   /mnt/mounted_drive  ntfs-3g  defaults,errors=remount-ro,permissions 0 2

What shall I do to mount the partition properly?

Answer 1

With NTFS-3G, setting the owning user and group seems only to be possible when a UserMapping file containing a mapping for the targeted user/group is present. This is not really clear from the documentation, but I'm testing it just now and that is what is happening.

If compatibility with an existing Windows installation is not needed, create an empty file .NTFS-3G/UserMapping on the mounted partition and fill it via:

getRUI4() { od -An -N4 -tu4 /dev/random | tr -d ' '; }
USERMAPPING=/media/NTFS_PARTITION/.NTFS-3G/UserMapping
echo ":users:S-1-5-21-$(getRUI4)-$(getRUI4)-$(getRUI4)-513" | sudo tee -a $USERMAPPING >/dev/null
echo "$(id -un):$(id -gn):S-1-5-21-$(getRUI4)-$(getRUI4)-$(getRUI4)-1001" | sudo tee -a $USERMAPPING >/dev/null

If you want to use existing Windows SIDs, you can instead use the program ntfsusermap on an unmounted (!) partition, which will interactively ask you to specify user- and group-names (do not need to be numeric, regardless of the message) for given paths where it first finds an as of yet unmapped ID. This is quick to do.

User and group root is mapped by default, as is other. The above lines will create a mapping for users group, and the current user. Repeat as necessary.

Also, in my case, I mount the drive with the options

no_def_opts,allow_other,acl,nodev,nosuid,big_writes,hide_dot_files

However, in your case you should not need any of them, although I find that these options improve upon the default, as otherwise for instance chown/chmod fail silently in case of errors.