Unable to mount drive as read-write

Although @ingopingo answered the question in one of the comments, i am going to write an answer with further information now.

By default the Linux kernel only supports reading from the NTFS file system. For read/write access you will need a read-write NTFS driver like the ntfs-3g package from extra repository.

After installation with sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g you are able to mount your NTFS partitions the usual way with sudo mount /path/to/ntfs /mount/point. This is possible due to a symlink of /usr/bin/mount.ntfs to /usr/bin/ntfs-3g.

Note: You need to have root privilegs to mount the filesystem. Requirements for an exception are listed in the ntfs-3g-FAQ.

Using the default settings the NTFS-partition will be mounted at boot. Put the following in your /etc/fstab:

/path/to/ntfs /mount/point ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

To be able to read-write with a non-root user, you have to set some additional options (username has to be changed to your username):

/path/to/ntfs /mount/point ntfs-3g uid=username,gid=users,umask=0022 0 0


I also had a read only mount problem and already used ntfs-3g. If someone else experiences this, check out ntfsfix /dev/yourPartitionToMount. It comes with the ntfsprogs under arch linux. This fixed my issue. I found it in the arch linux forum