File Operation not supported on Windows drives mounted on Ubuntu

Question

My Windows drives are automatically mounted in Ubuntu. File operations on Windows drives had been going well until today when my operation of creating a directory on a Windows drive is denied:

$ mkdir /Windows-d/tmp  
mkdir: cannot create directory `/Windows-d/tmp': Operation not supported  

Some permission info is:

$ ls -l / | grep "Windows-d"  
drwxrwx--- 1 root plugdev 229376 2009-11-28 20:28 Windows-d  

I wonder what's wrong with it?

Answer 1

What version of the NT filesystem module are you using. You can easily check for that by issuing

cat /var/log/messages | grep NTFS 

That should return back the version info and check with the distro's repository for a more updated version. You can check here to find out more about the driver. The other thing worth checking out is your file system table file (/etc/fstab) to see if the permissions is set for writing to it. Speaking of which, are you logged in as a normal user? Have you tried this with superuser access (root)?

As an example of such command to mount the NTFS partition here under the /mnt/Windows with readonly (-r) and umask (to control permissions), the filesystem is specified using the -t switch.

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/Windows -t ntfs -r -o umask=0222

Here's an example of such an entry within the /etc/fstab to automatically mount the NTFS partition

/dev/hda1 /mnt/Windows ntfs ro,umask=0222 

Now, if you have this similar layout, then your ntfs partition is mounted as readonly.