1. Detect storage hardware.
2. Detect NTFS on the hardware.
3. Start the NTFS-3G driver with the user and distribution preferred mount options.
4. Mount the NTFS volume.

Solution: If you would like to have this feature in your distribution then please ask your distribution vendor or developers to support this feature.

Workarounds: Either of the following could help.

• Creating a symbolic link, as shown below, is reported to solve automount on many distributions.

  ln -s /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g /sbin/mount.ntfs
  

• If you use KDE and get the "TODO: have to rethink extra options" error message then open `media:/' in Konqueror, choose `Storage Media', right click the removable device, select 'Properties', select the 'Mounting' tab then unselect the 'Mount as user' option.

• There is a great utility, called ntfs-config, which is reported to work fine on at least Ubuntu.

If only some files are missing then this means that your Operating System (OS) doesn't have the correct language specific settings (locale, LANG variable, LC_ALL, etc) thus some filenames can't be converted to your language and won't be visible. The reason can be:

• The locale setting wasn't configured during installation.
• Not the correct locale was configured.
• The configured value doesn't exist on the system.
• The OS configures the setting in a too late stage during the boot process, only after the NTFS volume was already mounted.

Solution: The OS vendor should move the language specific configuration to an earlier phase to precede the mounts of the NTFS volumes in time.

Workaround: NTFS-3G supports the 'locale' mount option which can be used to set the correct language value. You can see what locales you have on your system by using the following command:

locale -a

localedef -i pt_BR -f UTF-8 pt_BR.UTF-8

If some of your softwares are not UTF8 ready then they will not show correctly the UTF8 filenames. Please consult your distribution documentation about how to enable full UTF8 support.

Status: Not NTFS-3G problem. Please ask your OS vendor to fix the boot time configuration problem.

• Hardware or device driver faults. This is not always obvious immediately and the confirmation may require very good skills or special hardware testing utilities (memtest86+, badblocks, smartctl, etc). Windows often tries to handle and correct some hardware faults silently without reporting them to the user but not all operating systems took the same approach, instead they log the unexpected errors in the /var/log directory, typically in the messages.log, daemon.log, or system.log files. Most common Linux error messages referring to hardware problems:

  sd 1:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x10070000
  end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector ...
  Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block ...
  rejecting I/O to dead device
  lost page write due to I/O error on ...
  usb X-Y: device not accepting address Z, error -110
  reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 17
  sd 1:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
  sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_ABORT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
  sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
  ata1: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
  ata1: soft resetting link
  hda: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
  hda: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
  hda: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
  

• Seagate FreeAgent Desktop drives are causing data loss to users because they like to power down and the Linux kernel forgets to wake them up. Typical error message in the logs are like

  sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Device not ready: <6>: Sense Key : Not Ready [current]
  Add. Sense: Logical unit not ready, initializing command required
  

  Please see this link for more information and solution. It's said that the Linux kernel 2.6.24 had fixed this problem.
• It's keep being reported that some external LaCie drives have power supply problems, physical media damages (bad sectors) and sometimes the above Seagate FreeAgent problem.
• Lots of fatal hardware problems are being reported using Western Digital MyBook drives. You can read some of the horror stories here: [1], [2], [3].
• The Zonet USB 2 PCMCIA Adapter is another source of data corruption problems.
• Corrupt file system. Most often they are caused by unexpected power outage, improperly detaching external storage devices, uncleanly shuting down the operating system, file system drivers, partitioners, security softwares, viruses, root kits and other malwares.

  If the problem is definitely not hardware related then run

  chkdsk /f DRIVE:
  

  on Windows and if the I/O errors don't go away and you're using the latest NTFS-3G driver then please submit a bug report and provide us all the relevant system logs.

The MBR and the partition table are typically modified (corrupted) by boot managers, partitioners, security softwares, recovery softwares, viruses and other malwares, or some hardware fault.

Solution: Please ask your distribution developers to fix the Linux kernel problem. The Linux kernel must be upgraded either to at least version 2.6.20, or the FUSE kernel driver must be upgraded to a safe version which is also included in the FUSE package for Linux kernel version 2.6.9 and later.

Status: Not NTFS-3G problem.

1. ntfs-3g is compiled with integrated FUSE support
2. the ntfs-3g binary is at least version 1.2506
3. the ntfs-3g binary is set to setuid-root
4. the user has access right to the volume
5. the user has access right to the mount point

  chown root $(which ntfs-3g)
  chmod 4755 $(which ntfs-3g)

• to fix common FUSE kernel module loading problems
• to create the required but sometimes incorrectly removed or missing FUSE device file

  chown root.ntfsuser $(which ntfs-3g)
  chmod 4750 $(which ntfs-3g)

Solution: Use at least NTFS-3G 1.2506 with setuid-root set and make sure the user has access rights to the volume and mount point.

Workaround: If case insensitivity handling and/or restriction of special character usage is desirable then you may export the NTFS volume via Samba which supports this functionality the same way as it does for other POSIX file systems. An alternative solution for case insensitivity support is using ciopfs which mounts a normal directory on a regular file system in case insensitive fashion.

Status: Not NTFS-3G problem.

Solution: Please see here.

Status: Not NTFS-3G problem.

Workaround: Uncompress or decrypt the files on Windows.

Status: Sponsoring the development of this driver extension is possible.

• In some desktop configurations files are not deleted for real but moved into a 'Trash' or '.Trash-username' directory in the root of the partition. When these directories are emptied then the disk space is reclaimed.
• By design, Linux and Unixes free the disk space of the deleted files permanently only if no software keeps them open anymore.
• NTFS is able to store small files and directories in fixed size (1 kB) MFT records (inodes). When such files are deleted then the MFT records are marked free for reuse or for undelete, and no space can be freed.

dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1M count=2000
mkswap swapfile
swapon swapfile

Please also note that other solutions, for example using swap on a loop device, are not safe and can cause deadlock!

1. Obsolete: Use the FUSE kernel module from the FUSE 2.7.4 software package and please read the FUSE README.NFS file.
2. Preferred: Use the FUSE kernel module included in the Linux 2.6.27 and later kernels (the current git Linux kernel already includes FUSE NFS support).

Another reason can be the lack of kernel support for shared writable mmap which was added only to Linux kernel 2.6.26.

Solution: Add the 'exec' mount option to the end of the mount options. It's important that the option to be the last one, otherwise other mount option can over judge its effect. However please also note that Wine was not designed to run arbitrary applications directly from a Windows partition. To do so, one must install the Windows application via Wine onto the Windows partition first.

Status: Not NTFS-3G problem. The latest Firefox releases should fix this problem.

Workaround: Set "mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE" in the .vmx file. It will disable paging files and VMware will work fine, often with much better performance.

Status: The VMware bug has been fixed in all hosted products (Workstation, Fusion, Player, ...) released after Jan 30th 2008. Alternatively use Linux kernel 2.6.26 or later.

Encfs is hit by another Linux kernel deficiency. Since it uses a non-page size internal header thus writes are not page aligned and the kernel will split them which further halves encfs write performance.

Amarok performance may depend on the codec. Updating FLAC files are known to be slow because the software uses small write buffers.

If NTFS-3G uses close to 100% CPU time then it's usually a driver issue, though not always. If NTFS-3G doesn't use close to 100% CPU time then the problem is typically not directly related to and not caused by the NTFS-3G driver.

The most likely explanations are

• Not using at least NTFS-3G version 1.5012.
• Writing multi-GB files on a highly internally fragmented volume.
• Some softwares are using the most inefficient block sizes by default.
• Some softwares indeed do intensive file operations sometimes (Beagle, Amarok collectionscanner, updatedb, Spotlight, etc). The CPU usage is not directly visible in case of kernel file system drivers but this is not true for user space drivers. That is, they are in the process list unlike the kernel drivers. Higher CPU usage is absolutely normal and expected in such cases.
• The performance of Intel (and maybe some other?) SSDs (Solid State Disk) can dramatically fall with use and they require low level reformatting.
• The NTFS block size (cluster size) is smaller than 4096 bytes. This often happens, for instance, if FAT32 was converted to NTFS. The driver always logs this information for block devices. You can search for the value of the 'blksize' in the system log files under the /var/logs directory. Typically this information can be found in the 'messages' or 'daemon.log' log file, depending on your operating system.
• USB is running in Low- or Full-Speed mode instead of High-Speed mode. The USB performance is reported to be exceptionally bad on Mac OS X. Many users claimed that Firewire is much faster. Please note that NTFS-3G is independent of the bus type (USB, Firewire, SATA, PATA, etc), and the overall performance can depend on the bus type and its driver quality significantly.
• DMA is turned off. Check the BIOS and use hdpram, sdparm, blktool on Linux.
• Using an embedded device or a very fast I/O subsystem (100+ MB/s, RAID).
• Hardware or bad sector errors. Check the log files under /var/log.
• Some external USB drivers often powering down during write activity.
• The UBLIO caching layer is not integrated or enabled on Mac OS X.
• A highly sparse file is being regularly written or updated.
• A software ignores errors or doesn't have correct error handling. In such cases the problem often becomes visible in NTFS-3G, not in the faulty software because NTFS-3G CPU usage isn't fully optimized yet.
• Some Nautilus releases have a performance bug with files larger than around 20 MB. The problem goes away if command line tools or alternative file managers, like Thunar or Konqueror, are used.

Status: Performance improvement is ongoing. An optimized, high-performance version for embedded devices is available separately.

Workaround: Use a software which can compact the disk space (e.g. the free, open source ntfsresize: shrink then enlarge after making a backup). Please note, file level defragmentation, what the built-in Windows defragmenter is only capable, does not help usually.

Solution: Please the status information here.

Workaround: No need, this is a chkdsk bug. Please report it to Microsoft.

Status: Low priority work: NTFS-3G algorithms will be optimized too.

Cleaning up XXX unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up XXX unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up XXX unused security descriptors.

Workaround: No need.

Status: Not NTFS-3G problem.

Workaround: No need.

Status: Not NTFS-3G problem.

Status: The NTFS-3G 1.2310 driver has fixed this problem.