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I am trying to mount a hard drive with an NTFS filesystem on it on boot.

It doesn't need a special location. /mnt/ or something similar should be enough.

I had already done that with a drive but it is way back and i can't remember how I did it. Also I am too scared to just go dive into the fstab file.

I am on the latest Arch Linux 64 bit version

The drive is called /dev/sda1 (idk if thats important)

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  • Warning: If your NTFS partition is left in an inconsistent (or non-working) state by some other operating system, your boot will never complete. Mount it later, with a root @reboot cron job.
    – waltinator
    Commented Nov 6, 2021 at 19:08
  • how do you mean? how else should i mount it? over a script thats executed at startup? i dont quite get you i think. why would a partition thats just only data completely wreck my boot tho?
    – rafe
    Commented Nov 7, 2021 at 9:30
  • Read less /etc/crontab;man -a crontab. By starting your NTFS mount (which may have been made un-writeable by Windows) in a cron job, if the mount fails to complete, only a cron job hangs (and the cron daemon knows how to handle cron jobs that hang). If you mount the disk during system startup and, again, the mount fails to complete, your system startup will hang. This system startup hang is hard to diagnose, and requires a Live USB to remove the NTFS drive from fstab to get a failing system to boot
    – waltinator
    Commented Nov 8, 2021 at 1:49
  • well ok seems easy enough to fix. if i have boot problems i will remember that thank you!
    – rafe
    Commented Nov 8, 2021 at 17:07

2 Answers 2

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I recommend reading the fstab article on Arch Wiki, it's very good, but you don't really need that much, if your NTFS partition is /dev/sda1 all you need to add is this line

/dev/sda1  /mnt/<name>   ntfs   defaults  0 0

you don't really anything more that that.

You can also configure fstab from GUI using GNOME Disks. Select the NTFS partition, click one the Additional partition options icon and select Edit Mount options and then simply enable Mount at system startup, rest of the fields should be pre-filled with some reasonable defaults.

enter image description here

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  • u truly are a hero, ty. i used the option over the GUI as i did not want to fiddle with the fstab (i alr had but it was a complete mess of conflicting informations in forums and i think i am lucky i didnt break stuff)
    – rafe
    Commented Nov 6, 2021 at 19:55
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(can not add comments)

other idea (which may helps): libpammount to mount after a login

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  • thank you for the heads up. my problem is already solved but someone who may stumble across this may find it helpful. :)
    – rafe
    Commented Nov 7, 2021 at 9:29
  • also to mention: in the past activ ntfs mounts slowes down the system. i dont know if yet exists but thats why i choose that way (first) then a manual mount until i dont need ntfs anymore
    – f b
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 12:03

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