Fedora/Win10 Dual Boot/Drives: FSTAB Error but No Error in Boot.log

Ask Fedora
1

Hi Folks,

I’ve installed Fedora 44 w/ KDE in a separate SSD drive on my Win10 Dell laptop.

It all looked good and presented the Grub menu for Fedora and Win10.

After logging in, I was able to mount Windows drives from Dolphin and from the command line with no errors. I then edited fstab to mount four Win10 SSD drives/partitions, with the F: drive as an example, below:

UUID=BCFEE748FEE6F992 /home/f ntfs-3g defaults,nofail,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

…and then ran the command:

sudo findmnt --verify --verbose

It came back with Warnings:

/home/f
target exists
FS options: uid=1000,gid=1000
userspace options: nofail
UUID=BCFEE748FEE6F992 translated to /dev/nvme3n1p4
source /dev/nvme3n1p4 exists
[W] ntfs-3g seems unsupported by the current kernel
[W] ntfs-3g does not match with on-disk ntfs

It was the same for the other 3 drives. I also used this syntax in fstab:

UUID=BCFEE748FEE6F992 /home/f ntfs defaults 0 0

but got similar warnings.

=> In spite of those warnings, I could see the 4 drives inside Linux. I was able to read and write to files without a problem. (Except that XNViewMP did not seem to recognize the drives in its file manager. Weird. But it opened files on those drives, from within Dolphin.)

=> So, I rebooted into Win10 and did a chkdsk /f on all 4 drives (no errors reported) and then rebooted back into Linux and got the same errors on the fstab check.

=> So, I then did a grep in /var/logs for ‘Mount’ and it came back clean:

boot.log:[ OK ] Mounted home-f.mount - /home/f.
boot.log:[ OK ] Mounted home-d.mount - /home/d.
boot.log:[ OK ] Mounted home-c.mount - /home/c.
boot.log:[ OK ] Mounted home-e.mount - /home/e.

*** Thus, I’m not sure if I can ignore the fstab warnings. I read that any errors in fstab are serious and have to be dealt with, for the sake of data integrity.

But now I’m wondering if those errors listed above can be ignored.

Any thoughts? Any way to fix something to get rid of the errors?

As a reference, I spent many years in CentOS shells managing web servers, with Perl, PHP, etc, but this is actually my first Linux Desktop experience and my first Dual Boot attempt with Windows 10 and Linux.

My goal is to migrate off Win10 completely, but I’ll have to see how my multitudinous applications behave. :slight_smile:

Thanks for any advice!

Peter Falkenberg Brown

2

If I make a correct interpretation of the message it more looks like as a warning [W] than an error.
If you made this check while booting into Linux, it tells you that the linux kernel not supports ntfs-3g natively (it uses an other specific driver). Reading the Wikipedia Article, mentions that:

The NTFS-3G package includes the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE)-based ntfs-3g driver and a number of utilities for handling NTFS partitions (still called ntfsprogs). The driver supports all operations for writing files: files of any size can be created, modified, renamed, moved, or deleted on NTFS partitions. Transparent compression is supported, as well as the Encrypting File System.[9] (BitLocker is a layer of encryption outside of NTFS and requires the use of a different utility called cryptsetup.)

The only thing what could happen is that you slow down your system a bit when you need accessing data on the NTFS partition a lot. As you anyway plan to migrate to Fedora, I propose first migrate the data you need mostly and daily, into a native linux file system as ext4 or better btrfs. This way you probably will not need, to long an auto mount over fstab. I guess you can still manually mount it while using the password once to access the ntfs partition.

3

Hi Wikipedia Brown…

I also saw an error when I used this line in fstab:

UUID=BCFEE748FEE6F992 /home/f ntfs defaults 0 0

I.e. using ntfs instead of ntfs-3g.

Thus, it seemed to me that it wasn’t just an error from the older ntsf-3g, but perhaps something more global.

I guess my primary concern is disk integrity and thus data integrity.

Oh, I also have a HUGE amount of data on the 4 NTFS drives, which I don’t want to migrate until I’m completely off Windows. And even then, it’s a pain to migrate the data, so I’m hoping that I can just leave them as data-only NTFS drives.

Thanks,

Peter

4

This is not an ideal plan once windows is no longer involved.
Migration to a linux file system is the preferred method and will save you headaches in the future that can occur with a non-native file system.

If you were to migrate one to a linux file system, possibly by moving data and merging it onto the other 3, then it would be very easy to simply copy one at a time to linux without much issue. Migrate one, format the now empty drive to linux (ext4 or btrfs) migrate another, rinse and repeat. The file relocation can happen in the background and thus the impact on using the system would be little or none.

5

Thanks, Jeff… that’s a good plan.

I shall do that, once I’m done with the Windows apps.

My biggest concern was with DaVinci Resolve Studio until I discovered that Fedora is the base flavor of Linux that DaVinci was built on and thus works well on. (If I got that correctly.)

That and Affinity v2 and Affinity Studio. But it looks like Affinity will work on Wine.

I just have to get an “all clear” in terms of the fstab errors.

Peter

6

Any FSTab experts with feedback about this issue?

Thanks!

Peter

7

FWIW, there is a little bit of back history about NTFS support under Linux here:

Personally, I’ve always avoided using it under Linux.

Can you make do with a read-only mount of your NTFS filesystem? That might be a little safer if you are worried about that data.

8

Thanks, Gregory…

I read a lot and skimmed the second half of the link you included. Very interesting.
I’m a web database, Perl/PHP programmer, so the deep disk stuff is out of my arena.

If the NTSF disks are not reliable to write to from Linux, I suppose one way to migrate would be to create a Linux data partition and copy the data for each newly tested Linux app to that data folder and test the app again, with reads and writes on that data.

Using that method, I would essentially be moving the data for each app to Linux as I proceeded through the app migration process.

Is it correct that a binary data file (like a Word doc) is unchanged whether it’s on an NTFS or ext4 Linux partition? Thus, moving files from one file system to another is seamless?

=> I believe I saw a note in the link you sent about Btrfs being less reliable than ext4. So, for my new data partition, under Fedora 44, I’m wondering which one I should use.

=> And… are my fstab errors common to anyone who is trying to mount NTFS drives? I didn’t see any documentation on that phenomenon. This must be affecting anyone who is dual booting and dual-mounting drives. Or is my case just an outlier, with no way to fix it?

Thanks!

Peter

9

Yes, it will be unchanged. The filesystem type will not affect the data (whether binary or ascii text). Some file transfer programs (mainly old network FTP programs) do detect “plain text” files and will automatically change the line endings from \r\n to just \n (or vice versa) when moving files between a Windows system and a Linux/Unix system, but I cannot think of any local copy command that would do that automatically, so I don’t think you have to worry about it.

That is a harder question to answer. There are many trade-offs between the different filesystems. I would prefer Btrfs over ext4 because Btrfs will detect errors due to things like bit rot. Also, Btrfs can do snapshots and incremental backups (and RAID, etc., etc.). XFS would also be better than ext4, IMHO.

10

Thanks, Gregory! Very helpful advice.

But there’s still that initial issue:

Out of all the Windows to Linux migrations that are happening, with dual boots and dual drives, are most of them experiencing that fstab error? Or perhaps not noticing it?

And is there a fix to it, or do I just live with it, since it’s just a “warning”?

Thanks again,

Peter

11

It looks like you might need to use ntfs3 in /etc/fstab to mount using the ntfs3 driver?

That might be likely since most of the users who would pay attention to those log messages probably don’t use the NTFS driver.

I notice that the documentation about the Linux NTFS3 driver that I linked above specifically states “The driver works with NTFS versions up to 3.1.” You might try to determine what version your NTFS filesystem is. blkid /dev/nvme3n1p4 might provide you with that information, I’m not sure. If your filesystem is using features from a higher version of NTFS, then you should consider the NTFS3 driver “untested” against that version of NTFS. Never mind that last bit. It looks like 3.1 is the latest version of NTFS available, so that ntfs3 driver should work with any current Windows NTFS filesystem.

12 
Description     : NTFS-3G is a stable, open source, GPL licensed, POSIX, read/write NTFS
                : driver for Linux and many other operating systems. It provides safe
                : handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows
                : Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 NTFS file systems. NTFS-3G can
                : create, remove, rename, move files, directories, hard links, and streams;
                : it can read and write normal and transparently compressed files, including
                : streams and sparse files; it can handle special files like symbolic links,
                : devices, and FIFOs, ACL, extended attributes; moreover it provides full
                : file access right and ownership support.

It is listed till Win7 NTFS. Is your data from this time? Are all the disk made with Win10?

The kernel warning you can not change.
And the second message is probably referring to the FS on which you start your Fedora which would be ext4 (/boot)
The warning is not really clear, however a warning should not affect your system.

As you self said, try to migrate as fast as you use the data on Fedora on the Fedora File system.
Ext4 and btrfs are both a valid option. If you choose ext4 you have fix partition sizes while btrfs makes them dynamically. And an other advantage is that you can use it to create snapshots.

13

Hi Gregory,

Thanks… I did try ntfs3 but also got errors.

I’ll check my drives for the NTFS version, if I can.

It’s a Dell 7780 laptop; around 3 years old.

If I can’t find the answer, it seems most logical to simply mount as read-only and copy the data for each application as I go.

Thanks again for your excellent and comprehensive answers!

Peter

14

Hi Wikipedia Brown…

All four SSD drives were formatted fresh, around 3 years, under Win10. However, the data copied onto them stretches as far back in time as 1993. Zowie! :slight_smile:

So, we’ll see!

Thanks again,

Peter