How to mount a NTFS partition in /etc/fstab?

I have two partitions that I want to mount on startup:

/dev/sda3   /mnt/devel  ext4    defaults    0   2
/dev/sda2   /mnt/excess ntfs    defaults    0   2

The ext4 partition mounts fine (owned by me, writable only by me), but the NTFS mounts owned by root with R\W permission for all.

How to fix this?

drwxr-xr-x  7 amanda amanda 4096 2012-03-14 19:07 devel
drwxrwxrwx  1 root   root   4096 2012-03-14 22:38 excess

Solution 1:

Permissions for ntfs and vfat file systems must be set with the dmask, fmask and umask options. dmask controls permissions for directories, fmask controls permissions for files, and umask controls both. Since these options set masks, they should be the complement of the permissions you want. For example, rwx for the owner and rx for others is 022 rather than 755.

To set the owner, use the uid and gid options for user and group, respectively. You can find your UID with the command id -u. To find your GID, use id -g. These values are both usually 1000.

A common set of mount options for ntfs is uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=027,fmask=137. This sets you as the owner of the drive, and sets the permissions to drwxr-x---.

Here are two lines from my /etc/fstab working

UUID=EEA2B69CA2B668AB        /WIN_C     ntfs-3g   defaults,nls=utf8,umask=000,dmask=027,fmask=137,uid=1000,gid=1000,windows_names 0 0 
UUID=65AEC0E830EA0497        /WIN_D     ntfs-3g   rw 0 0

If you get no visible error after rebooting and partitions stay readonly or you get an error similar to:

Error mounting /dev/sda6 at /media/WindowsDrive: 
Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=0077,fmask=0177" "/dev/sda6" "/media/rolindroy/Media Center"' exited with non-zero exit status 14: The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0). 
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount. 
Failed to mount '/dev/sda6': Operation not permitted The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. 
Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option

This is because Windows 8 and 10 offer a "Fast Startup" option that depends on a "non-complete" shutdown. You can disable fast startup by following these steps under "Power Options".

Solution 2:

If you mount the ntfs partition with the permissions option, then chmod / chown will work

/dev/sda2   /mnt/excess ntfs-3g    permissions,locale=en_US.utf8    0   2

You can then

sudo chown your_user:your_user /mnt/excess

Easier then uid,dmask,fmask.