Accessing Windows NTFS Disks from Linux VMs

Generally, Windows® and Linux servers don’t mix and don’t share data. But, it is possible to access Windows New Technology File System (NTFS) disks within a Linux Virtual Machine (VM) using Go Daddy Cloud Servers™. We don’t recommend this setup for production systems, but it can be handy if you just need to copy a few files off of a Windows Elastic Virtual Disk (EVD) and don’t have a Windows VM available.

First, start by attaching the NTFS EVD to the Linux VM. You can only attach an EVD to one VM at a time, so you can’t access the NTFS disk from a Linux VM (or any other VM) while the EVD is still attached to a Windows VM.

Follow the appropriate instructions for your Linux operating system below.

NOTE: The root user must run these commands.

CentOS

Download and install the rpmforge-release package appropriate for your version of CentOS:

• CentOS 5.x i386 (32-bit)
  
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm


• CentOS 5.x x86_64 (64-bit)
  
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm


• CentOS 6.x x86_64 (64-bit)
  
wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm


Next, install the fuse-ntfs-3g package:

yum --enablerepo=rpmforge install fuse-ntfs-3g

Finally, issue the mount command. In this example, we are mounting the NTFS EVD from /dev/xvdb1 to the mount point /mnt:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/xvdb1 /mnt

Your NTFS EVD data is now available under the /mnt directory. When finished, use the umount command to unmount the NTFS EVD from the Linux VM:

umount /mnt

See the official CentOS wiki for more details on mounting NTFS filesystems in CentOS.

Fedora

If not already installed, use yum to install the ntfs-3g package (Cloud Server Fedora 16 VMs come with ntfs-3g installed by default):

yum install ntfs-3g

Issue the mount command for the NTFS EVD. In this example, we are mounting the NTFS EVD from /dev/xvdb1 to the mount point /mnt:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/xvdb1 /mnt

Your NTFS EVD data is now available under the /mnt directory. When finished, use the umount command to unmount the NTFS EVD from the Linux VM:

umount /mnt

Ubuntu

If not already installed, use apt-get to install the ntfs-3g package (Cloud Server Ubuntu 10.04 and 11.10 VMs come with ntfs-3g installed by default):

apt-get install ntfs-3g

Issue the mount command for the NTFS EVD. In this example, we are mounting the NTFS EVD from /dev/xvdb1 to the mount point /mnt:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/xvdb1 /mnt

Your NTFS EVD data is now available under the /mnt directory. When finished, use the umount command to unmount the NTFS EVD from the Linux VM:

umount /mnt

Some of the information in this article is advanced material we make available as a courtesy. Please be advised that you are responsible for properly following the procedures outlined above. Customer Support cannot assist with these topics.