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I've been having a problem with my Raspberry Pi: it keeps mounting my USB hard drive as read-only. I've been mounting it with sudo mount -t ntfs -o umask=000 /dev/sda1 "/media/My Book" but for some reason it now says mount: warning: /media/My Book/ seems to be mounted read-only when I do so, and ls -l shows it's correct. The drive has its own power supply and it works fine with my laptop, so I think the problem must be with the Pi. What am I doing wrong?

Just to be clear, that command used to work, but now it doesn't. And it's now read-only for EVERYONE, even root:

$ ls -l /media
total 8
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Apr 28 11:11 My Book

The contents appear the same way.

Update: Probably found the cause. From /var/log/syslog:

May 17 19:37:52 raspberrypi kernel: [   64.688724] NTFS driver 2.1.30 [Flags: R/W MODULE].
May 17 19:37:52 raspberrypi kernel: [   65.195397] NTFS volume version 3.1.
May 17 19:37:52 raspberrypi kernel: [   65.195439] NTFS-fs error (device sda1): load_system_files(): Volume is dirty.  Mounting read-only.  Run chkdsk and mount in Windows.

Probably should've tried looking there before...

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  • 2
    Is the NTFS on the disk clean? If not, try plugging it into a windows host, run checkdisk and cleanly unmount it. Then try again with the rPi
    – Hennes
    May 18, 2013 at 0:31
  • I'll try it, but first: is there any chance that could destroy data on the drive? It has all of my backups on it...
    – Zelda64fan
    May 18, 2013 at 0:38
  • Almost no risk. A MS windows system should not destroy any data with a fsck from on their own designed filesystem. Note that I recommended the disk check from a windows system. I make no such guarantees with FUSE_NTFS or reverse engineered filesystem drivers.
    – Hennes
    May 18, 2013 at 0:40
  • @Hennes That didn't seem to help...although the check program may have crashed. Is there some way I could (safely) check it from Linux?
    – Zelda64fan
    May 18, 2013 at 2:08
  • You can also force mount a dirty drive but that's not recommended unless you don't care about the data
    – nijave
    Aug 20, 2016 at 22:49

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5

I don't have Windows, but I fixed the problem by running 

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdc1

The according package for the command is usually named ntfs-3g.

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  • This works! Should be the accepted answer.
    – arainone
    Jul 13, 2018 at 22:48
3

Running chkdsk E: /F on Windows fixed it.

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  • Background knowledge: Manu (all) NTFS filesystem drivers will not mount a NTFS volume R/W if they detect something is wrong. This includes when the dirty flag is set. (E.g. it did not get unmounted cleanly; pulling the USB cable before umount finishes etc etc). <strike>fsck</strike> chkdsk on windows checks and marks it back as clean.
    – Hennes
    May 18, 2013 at 16:20
  • @Hennes so, what do you do if you don't have Windows?
    – Hi-Angel
    Aug 20, 2016 at 19:49
  • Pray and trust the (reverse engineered?) versions of fsck.ntfs or just not use NTFS at all.
    – Hennes
    Aug 21, 2016 at 0:02
  • I ran fsck /f on windows 10 and it showed no issues and when I connected it back to Pogoplug, it still mounted it as readonly and the dmesg output still said $LogFile is not clean. Mounting read-only. Mount in Windows.. The Linux ntfs driver is finding something that the windows doesn't find, probably a bug in the Linux ntfs driver?
    – haridsv
    Jun 8, 2019 at 16:28

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