The NTFS-3G driver is an open source, freely available
NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support.
It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003,
Windows 2000 and Windows Vista file systems. Most POSIX file system operations are supported,
with the exception of full file ownership and access right support.
The purpose of the project is to develop, continuously quality test and support a trustable, feature rich and high performance solution for hardware platforms and operating systems whose users need to reliably interoperate with NTFS. Besides this practical goal, the project also aims to explore the limits of a hybrid, kernel/user space file system driver approach. Performance, reliability and feature richness per invested effort are being examined.
The driver is in STABLE status. Please see our test methods and testimonials on the driver quality page.
The stable NTFS-3G driver is ntfs-3g-1.0.tgz. The software changes can be found on the Release History page. FUSE 2.6 or later is required to ensure maximum reliability and please check this highly common FUSE installation problem too. You can subscribe here for new release notifications. The NTFS-3G driver is also available for Mac OS X, FreeBSD, BeOS, and Haiku.
There were over 144,935 downloads, moreover many distributions include, or have easy-to-install, binary packages available as well:
| AliXe | Dyne:bolic | Knoppicillin | Pardus Linux | SimplyMEPIS |
| ALT Linux | Elive | Knoppix | Parsix | Slackware |
| Arch Linux | FC-One | Kuliax | Parted Magic | Slax |
| Ark Linux | Fedora | Kurumin | PCLinuxOS | Source Mage |
| ASPLinux | Frugalware | Linux-EduCD | Pingwinek | SystemRescueCd |
| Aurora | Gentoo | Linux Mint | PLD Linux | T-Resc |
| Austrumi | GParted | Litrix | PUD Linux | T2 |
| B2D Linux | grml | Mandriva | Puppy | Tilix |
| Berry Linux | Helix | MCNLive | QiLinux | Trinity Rescue Kit |
| BOSS | Insert | Musix | Red Hat | Ubuntu |
| Caixa Magica | K-DEMar | nUbuntu | ROCK Linux | UTUTO |
| CDriveBack | Kanotix | openSUSE | SAM Linux | Vector Linux |
| Debian | KateOS | paldo | Sauver | |
| Dreamlinux | Knoppel | Panic Linux | Sidux |
You may follow a previous link for distribution specific installation instructions.
The development source code is also available via CVS and Mercurial.
Make sure that the basic Linux development tools and the full FUSE package is already installed correctly on the computer. Please note, FUSE 2.6.0 or later is required to guarantee full data safety. Then type:
./configure
make
make install # or 'sudo make install' if you aren't root
If there was no error during installation then the NTFS volume can be mounted in read-write mode for everybody as follows. Unmount the volume if it had already been mounted, replace /dev/hda1 and /mnt/windows, if needed.
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
You may also need to set the 'locale' option to make all file names with national
characters visible. Replace the below hu_HU.utf8 with the
appropriate setting.
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -o locale=hu_HU.utf8
Please see the ntfs-3g manual page for more options and examples.
You can also make NTFS to be mounted during boot by adding the following
line to the end of the /etc/fstab file:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs-3g defaults 0 0