HOWTO Add NTFS support to RHEL 5 / CentOS 5

From Consultancy.EdVoncken.NET

Adding read/write NTFS support to RHEL 5 / CentOS 5 requires a couple of steps:

Install FUSE support

FUSE stands for "Filesystem in Userspace". Many different filesystems have been implemented on top of the FUSE library.

For this article, I am using a CentOS 5 installation, x86_64, Xen guest (DomU).

 # uname -a
 Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5xen #1 SMP Thu May 7 11:07:18 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Ensure that the appropriate kernel development files are installed (you may need to install additional packages for developing software)

 # yum install kernel-headers kernel-xen-devel

Note: if the ./configure command fails in the FUSE section below, re-check that you have the proper kernel-devel or kernel-xen-devel package installed, depending on the kernel that you are running.

Download and install FUSE

Download the latest stable version of FUSE
Configure, make and install FUSE:

 # tar xvf fuse-2.7.4.tar.gz
 # cd fuse-2.7.4
 # ./configure
 # make
 # make install

Note: you will want to keep the source code available in case you update the kernel.

Configure FUSE to start automatically

Make sure the /etc/init.d/fuse script contains the following lines at the top:

 #!/bin/sh
 #
 # chkconfig: 2345 90 10
 # description:       Load the fuse module and mount the fuse control filesystem.
 #

Add the FUSE service to the list of startup items, and start the service:

 # chkconfig --add fuse
 # service fuse start
 Loading fuse module.
 Mounting fuse control filesystem.

You can check the status using the service command:

 # service fuse status
 Checking fuse filesystem ok.

What to do after installing an updated kernel

Since FUSE is a kernel module, chances are that a kernel update will disable all FUSE functionality.

To rebuild the FUSE module, run the following commands in the source directory:

 # ./configure
 # make clean
 # make install

Restart FUSE:

 # service fuse restart

Verify that FUSE is available again:

 # service fuse status
 Checking fuse filesystem ok.

Install NTFS-3G support

Download the latest stable version from the NTFS-3G website.

 # tar zxvf ntfs-3g-2009.4.4.tgz
 # cd ntfs-3g-2009.4.4
 # ./configure
 # make
 # make install

Configure and use NTFS support

In this example, I will be mounting an NTFS drive containing video files:

 # mkdir /mnt/video
 # mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mnt/video/

Check that the filesystem was mounted properly:

 # mount
 ...
 fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
 /dev/sda1 on /mnt/video type fuseblk (rw,allow_other,blksize=4096)

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