Can't write to NTFS formatted drives

If you're dual-booting, try

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda1

and replace /dev/sda1 with the partition name (e.g. /dev/sda4 [for the fourth partition on the primary hard drive] or /dev/sdb [for a single partitioned secondary drive]).

You need to mount the NTFS drive with the UTF-8 options. If you look up on Google how to mount the ntfs-3g filesystem , you'll see that you need these options:

defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8

The symptom that you will get if your missing the UTF-8 option is that you can read to the drive but you cannot write. For, example, you would lose the ability to move a file off of the drive.

Note: a link to more info is here . The UTF-8 option is mentioned here .

For ntfs you should use the permissions option.

Using /dev/sda1 as an example (you can use UUID in fstab as well), mounted at /media/ntfs (adjust your partition / mountpoint / fstab entry to your needs).

Edit /etc/fstab

# graphical
gksu gedit /etc/fstab

# command line
sudo -e /etc/fstab

Add/Edit your entry to look similar this line

/dev/sda1 /media/ntfs ntfs-3g locale=en_US.UTF-8,permissions 0 0

Make a mount point (if needed)

[[ -d /media/ntfs ]] || sudo mkdir /media/ntfs

Unmount and re-mount the ntfs partition

sudo umount /dev/sda1
sudo mount /media/ntfs

Now you can manage the ownership and permissions with chown and chmod

sudo chown -R your_user:your_user /media/ntfs
chmod -R ug+rw /media/ntfs

If, after all that, the partition is not working as expected, check it from windows.

Thank goodness I found this post. I was having a similar problem where i could make a folder or file, but I could not change the file or folder except delete it. It gets really annoying when you must do chmod on every new file or folder.

All I did was:

sudo apt-get purge ntfsprogs
sudo apt-get purge ntfs-3g
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

The purge option is a full uninstall. After that, I just grabbed a fresh install. Simple, and it works.

Running

sudo apt-get purge ntfs-3g

and then

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

worked for me.

I guess it's because initrd.img was not generated with the ntfs-3g module while kernel update took place. Just a guess because I didn't have ntfsprogs installed. I had only ntfs-3g which didn't work.