CentOS 5.8 Mounting External NTFS Hard Drive

1. Use the following command to find out what device the drive is:

fdisk -l

It's usually one letter in alphabet after your last known drive, i.e. if you just have one physical drive which things are installed to, then that is probably sda, and the external drive is sdb.

Note: If you don't have fdisk, run the command:

yum install util-linux

2. To mount NTFS filesystems, you need to add the rpmforge repository. For 32bit systems this can be done with the following commands:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

rpm -Uhv rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

3. Install NTFS-3G using this YUM command:

yum install fuse fuse-ntfs-3g dkms dkms-fuse

4. Make a directory where you want to mount the drive. I did it like so:

mkdir /mnt/external_hard_drive

5. Use the mount command to mount the filesystems:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/external_hard_drive