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/etc/fstab bing a very important NTFS drive on boot
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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You can't set permissions and ownership because NTFS doesn't support Linux style permissions and ownership.
Why not copy the data elsewhere, format drive to ext4 or btrfs, then copy the data back? Don't use NTFS on Linux unless you enjoy having less control, unless you're sharing the drive with Windows then you have no choice I suppose.
TLDR: NTFS bad (not really, but sort of).
If you are staying on NTFS, you can stop reading here.
Anyway if you decide to migrate off NTFS, and assuming your username is zapBrannigan:
(recursively sets user ownership to zapBrannigan, sets group ownership to root, setting the group to root is a nice default because it's effectively "no group" and limits access to non-privileged, non-you users)
sudo chown -R zapBrannigan:root /path/to/drive
(recursively sets user, group, other permissions, where 664 corresponds to "allow rw-rw-r--", in this representation, the mode bits 664 are a binary mask, 6=110, 4=100, so you're setting 110110100 which sets the allow described above)
sudo chmod -R 664 /path/to/drive
The first command sets ownership to you, the user. The second command allows the user to read and write every file, and other users to read every file, set to 660 to forbid other users.
After that I suspect your fstab issue will become solvable.
If anything scares you, audit the data and backup the critical segments before working with the drive. I am assuming you don't have free space to backup the entire drive, if you do, then just do that.