How to mount external NTFS hard disk without superuser?

Question

I have got some issue with auto mount any external drives or partitions !! And every time I need to give sudo command from telnet to mount it such as

sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /media/raed

I have tried with this command (sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdc1) but nothing change

Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdc1 was processed successfully.

Answer 1

how to mount a disk without superuser (root)

Normally in Linux by default the action of mounting a disk, regardless of it is internal or external, requires root or elevated privileges. It is a basic security setting. But that setting can easily be modified to suit your needs... and allow specific users or all users to mount

First you will need to be root, or have enough of a superuser privilege to modify the specific security settings to open up the use of the mount command to users. To do this, there are various ways, see

How to allow non-superusers to mount any filesystem?

you mentioned how to mount an external disk

Whether the disk is external, or internal, is largely irrelevant. As long as Linux first recognizes the connected disk whether it is by USB connection or SATA or SAS or other, it will show up as some block device such as /dev/sdb for example. That needs to already be happening, if so then if all else is well you should be able *to mount the disk.

you mentioned a NTFS disk

Once the disk shows up as a block device, such as /dev/sdb for example, then Linux can begin to work with it. But the disk had to then have a valid partition table (GPT or MSDOS for example) as well as valid partitions and then a valid file system on a specific partition. For example the most common partition table today is GPT, and then you may see more than one partition on your disk that shows up as /dev/sdb and then you will see something like /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2 and so on. On any of those 1,2,3..N partitions will need to be a file system Linux can work with. Since you mentioned NTFS you will require the ntfs-3gdriver, which is available from https://www.tuxera.com/company/open-source/. However if you are running a very new linux kernel, I have read it now includes support for NTFS file systems so you do not have to manually go get and install ntfs-3g

I have got some issue with auto mount any external drives or partitions

Realize that there are multiple ways to mount a disk in /etc/fstab

• by name
• by uuid
• by disk label
• by path

What can happen if you mount by name which will be a line something like this in /etc/fstab

/dev/sdb1   /data   ntfs-3g  defaults,nofail  0  0

That as you add remove disks in the system that sdb can refer to some other disk, and cause problems. So it is usually best to mount by uuid, or by label if you have set a partition label. Such a line in /etc/fstab would look like

# the uuid xxxx will be some long unique string
/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxx   /data    defaults,nofail 0 0
LABEL=yourlabel   /data   defaults,nofail 0 0

To identify the uuid or label, you can do

lsblk -o size,fstype,model,name,serial,uuid,label

to see pertinent disk information to then understand what is what.

After all that, if you then get file system errors where NTFS is corrupted and you have to run ntfsfix then that's a different problem. My recommendation here would be to use Microsoft Windows 10 or later and use its ntfsrepair tool since NTFS is a proprietary microsoft file system; you take your chances with linux tools working on the ntfs file system.

You want to turn off Fast Startup in Microsoft windows so upon shutdown in windows it will fully close and unmount the NTFS file system so linux can later use it... if your disk gets mounted by linux and windows. Otherwise you will likely always encounter ntfs errors in linux where linux will prompt you to repair it.