Accent are not displayed on external disks automatically mounted with ntfs-3g

[miraks]

I am on Kubuntu Gutsy.

When my external disk is AUTOMATICALLY (with the panel) mounted, I am not able to see files with accents (éèà, …).
Mtab contains:
/dev/sda1 /media/TVIX fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,allow_other,blksize=512 0 0

I don't understand why ?

I know the bug #132357, but for me it's not due to utf8 / "locale" of something like this !

For more information (excuse me for the French): http://forum.kubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=151442

[miraks (s-mankowski)]

Since the official version of gutsy, it doesn't work with "pmount /dev/sda1" or "pmount-hal /dev/sda1" too :-(.
Now the mtab always contains:
/dev/sda1 /media/TVIX fuseblk rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,allow_other,blksize=512 0 0

If I try to create a directory or a file containing an accent, I get an error:
> touch tété
touch: ne peut faire un touch sur `tété': Chaîne multi-octets ou étendue de caractères invalide ou incomplète

[miraks (s-mankowski)]

If I mount the external disc by doing:
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /home/s/test

then, I am able to see and to create files/directories with accent.

I don't understand why it's not the case with pmount !

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

This bug was nominated for Gutsy but does currently not qualify for a 7.10 stable release update (SRU) and the nomination is therefore declined.
According the the SRU policy, the fix should already be deployed and tested in the current development version before an update to the stable releases will be considered. With 7.10 now released, that policy applies to this bug. See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates .
The bug is not being closed as work will continue on fixing it for the next release, Hardy Heron (8.04). If the state of this bug should change such that it qualifies for the SRU process, please contact the person who originally declined it and ask them to re-evaluate it. To help improve the state of this bug see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/HowToTriage .

[miraks (s-mankowski)]

I found the solution:

If you use KDE, you may have problem with filenames containing non-latin characters. This happens because kde's mounthelper is not parsing correctly the policies and locale option. There is a workaround for this:

1) Remove the "/sbin/mount.ntfs-3g" which is a symlink. code: rm /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g

2) Replace it with a new bash script containing:

#!/bin/bash
/bin/ntfs-3g $1 $2 -o locale=en_US.UTF-8 #put your own locale here

3) Make it executable: chmod +x /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g

There is only a problem with partition labels containing spaces, so if you have such a label, replace the space with an underscore, otherwise when you try to mount it you will get an error

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

pmount has not been used any more since around Edgy.

[miraks (s-mankowski)]

Hi Martin,

You said "pmount has not been used any more since around Edgy.". It's strange because of on my KUBUNTU 7.10, pmount and pmount-hal seems to be used.

I any case, I found the solution (see my previous post).

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

miraks [2008-03-19 16:11 -0000]:
> You said "pmount has not been used any more since around Edgy.". It's
> strange because of on my KUBUNTU 7.10, pmount and pmount-hal seems to be
> used.

It might still be installed, but mounting a drive through the KDE UI
triggers a hal function call, not pmount.

[Henrik Pauli (ralesk)]

This seemed to work in pre-release Hardy (Kubuntu) since about December or January, without me having to hack around — about since the release, it doesn’t work once again :(

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

copying Reinhard Berger's description from duplicate bug 228589

in Kubuntu Hardy NTFS Volumes are NOT mounted with my correct locale settings.

German Umlauts (e.g. ü Ä) are not displayed, instead i get in the systemlog

Skipping unrepresentable filename (inode 53045): Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character

when i mount the NTFS Volume manually with

sudo mount /dev/sdi1 /media/WD200 -o locale=de_AT.UTF-8

the German umlauts are visible.

[Roy W. Andersen (ensnared)]

I can confirm this exact behaviour with Hardy, for Norwegian language characters (æ, ø and å). Files and folders containing these characters simply do not show up when mounted during boot. Unmounting and mounting it manually fixes it.

/etc/fstab for the partition:
UUID=C6468CA1468C9439 /mnt/storage ntfs auto,rw,user,umask=007,uid=1000,gid=1000,utf8 0 1

I've also tried replacing "utf8" with "locale=en_US.utf8" which makes no difference whatsoever. The only thing I do to fix it is:
sudo umount /mnt/storage
sudo mount /mnt/storage

No options necessary, so apparently the fstab entry is correct, but it doesn't work on boot.

[DanWei (danielweigl)]

This problem is still recent on hardy. I have seen this behaviour on two different PCs when an external drive with NTFS is attached.

Folders or files containing Umlauts (äöü) are simply not shown. I was already starting testdisk to try to recover the files, bec. I thought the filesystem got somehow corrupted.

I dont know if this bug is still in interpid - if so it should be marked as critical... I think that could be a big and bad surprise for many users.

[Joel Fuster (j-fuster)]

I am having this same issue with Intrepid. Just to be clear--the locale setting in /etc/fstab does not appear to work unless I manually umount and mount the filesystem after boot. No parameters are necessary other than the mount point.

This bit from the NTFS-3G site seems promising (http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#locale):

        * The OS configures the setting in a too late stage during the boot process, only after the NTFS volume was already mounted.

    The most common explanation is the latter one. This is why unmounting then mounting such volumes after boot often makes all filenames visible.