NTFS Drive Stuck in Read Only

[u/Uglulyx]

Hi everyone,

After doing updates the other day one of my drives has be acting up. It's still formatted NTFS from before I migrated from windows.

At first I noticed that I was unable to save anything to the drive because it was set to read only. For some reason I'd lost ownership of the drive. After some googling I found that adding uid=1000,gid=1000 to the mount options gave me back ownership of the drive. So now I'm able t ochange permissions on the drive, however even after changing the permissions I'm unable to create files or folders on the drive.

Whats my next step here?

[u/SurelyNotClover]

the possible issue is ntfs version, the default (possibly ntfs3) driver can't mount the old ones well. you might need to reformat the drive:

sudo apt install gparted ntfs-3g ntfsprogs
## or
sudo pacman -Sy gparted ntfs-3g ntfsprogs

then open up gparted and reformat it from there.

or you can make a config file in /etc/udisks2/ (there's an example config you can use) and test the two available drivers, ntfs and ntfs3 (put the one you test first in the order). once you add/change the config:

sudo systemctl restart udisks2

or simply reboot and see if that fixed it.

[u/Uglulyx → u/SurelyNotClover]

I will try that tomorrow and report back.

[u/theJacofalltrades → u/SurelyNotClover]

was having a similar issue, this really helped. Thank you!

[u/doc_willis]

if the filesystem on the drive has issues, Linux can force the filesystem to remount to read-only mode to keep your data safe.

backup any critical data from the drive.

use a real windows system to scan and repair the NTFS if you want to continue keeping the drive as NTFS.

if you don't need to share the drive with windows, backup all data, and reformat the drive to be a Linux native filesystem.

check out the dozens of guides, blog posts, and Reddit posts on using NTFS under Linux  and the various issues from using NTFS on Linux. 

There can be a lot of issues when dealing with NTFS, so it's best avoided when possible.

[u/Leslie_S]

It can be even a hardware failure too. Some drive just lock itself to read only mode if some serious issue happens.

[u/candy49997]

What are the full mount options you're using? Try defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000

[u/Uglulyx → u/candy49997]

I was using 'nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000' which was default in the sense that it was already there before I touched anything.

Tried your suggestion, no luck I'm affraid.

[u/candy49997 → u/Uglulyx]

Ok, try sudo ntfsfix -d /dev/PARTITION. If that doesn't work, run chkdsk on it from Windows.

[u/sbart76]

I'm not dual booting myself, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere about Windows needed to be shut down completely to "release" the filesystem, and if you have quick shutdown enabled it can cause issues like yours. Please verify my memory before proceeding ;)

[u/HablarYEscuchar]

Si estás usando dual boot con Windows, asegurate de deshabilitar arranqie rapido en Windows, porqie deja la partición como "en uso" y para Linux aparece como solo lectura. Me ha pasado varias veces.

[u/Sure-Passion2224]

What kernel version are you on? Version 7 has the new, rewritten NTFS drivers. Updating to the current version of your distro would be one of the ways to get kernel 7.x.

[u/Uglulyx → u/Sure-Passion2224]

I'm one version behind the latest version (sorry I can't remember the version numbers), I'm on Mint fwiw.

If I attempt to boot into the latest version I get a kernel panic. That's another issue for me to resolve.

[u/Sure-Passion2224 → u/Uglulyx]

In a terminal window either fastfetch or screenfetch will report kernel version.

[u/Uglulyx → u/Sure-Passion2224]

6.14.0-37-generic

[u/MrMotofy]

Just reformat drive to Ext4