Mounting NTFS on Solaris 11

There are many blog entries and forum posts out there that talk about how to mount an NTFS partition or external drive on Solaris, but pretty much all of them are either outdated or have broken links.  I needed to mount my Western Digital My Passport on my Solaris 11 NAS, but NTFS wasn’t there.  So what I am posting here isn’t new, but just a summary of what I found that is still available today.  So far I have found two tools, not new, but located their current home.

mount-ntfs

mount-ntfs is a single binary solution.  You can download it from SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mount-ntfs/ .  It’s a simple binary that you can run as such.

mount_ntfs /dev/rdsk/c15t0d0p0 /mnt/pp

FSWpart and FSWfsmisc

FSWpart and FSWfsmisc are Solaris packages that add NTFS as a valid filesystem to the standard mount utilities.  You can download these packages from ftp://ftp.sun.drydog.com/pub/solaris/.
Uncompress and install the packages with ‘root’ privileges.

% gunzip -c FSWpart.tar.gz | tar xvf -
# pkgadd -d . FSWpart

% gunzip -c FSWfsmisc.tar.gz | tar xvf -
# pkgadd -d . FSWfsmisc

Now you can mount just like any other partition.

mount -F ntfs /dev/rdsk/c15t0d0p0 /mnt/pp/

The one thing to note that is different about these tools compared to the standard mount tools, is that they run as a process.  Once you mount your partition, it will tell you that you need to kill the process to unmount the partition.  Using umount won’t work.

Enjoy.

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