External USB Disk - NTFS Mount

In my last post I eluded to purchasing an Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme external hard-drive and was woefully disappointed in the inability to mount it from Linux and gain write permissions. This is how I resolved it for Debian 4.0 - AMD64 distro.

I 'fixed' this by reformatting the drive as a FAT32 file system which technically resolved the issue, but FAT32 didn't support my needs as I needed to store large files (5+ Gigs) on the drive.

I later found that if I installed the ntfs-3g driver and mounted it using this file system type that I could in fact read and write to the drive.

# vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Adding this line:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian etch-backports main

Followed by:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install ntfs-3g

then, define the mount point and edit the /etc/fstab as follows:

# mkdir /media/usbdisk

and add this line to /etc/fstab

/dev/sdc1       /media/usbdisk    ntfs-3g    rw,user,noauto  0       0

# mount /media/usbdisk

Ta-Da.