Take the 2-minute tour ×

i've seen this answer, but it requires the partition to always be mounted (and do the user access via group perms on the root FS that mounted the NTFS)

What i'm hopping to be possible, is to allow only a couple users to initiate the mount of the partition.

I will rarely have need to mount that partition, and leaving it mounted all the time is just asking for trouble on a portable that will be sleeping/waking/and moving a lot.

is it possible? something like:


/dev/sda1 /windows ntfs noauto,user=userA,user=userB,rw 0 0

And ideally, requiring the user the type in the password to confirm. I have no idea what happens on the gui land... but trying to learn. if this was a regular server, i'd simply add them to sudoers with that mount point allowed.

I think ultimately i will just make them 2 administrators of the machine. But i wanted to avoid that.

share|improve this question
This should be possible using polkit (nee PolicyKit). Prompting for password should be possible too. udisks.freedesktop.org/docs/latest/udisks-polkit-actions.html. There are several different actions you can configure; I assume you'd want the fstab-related one. I would try using one of the UUID arguments to limit it to the specific filesystem. –  sourcejedi Feb 15 '13 at 9:06
thanks you! i'm going over those. Just a note, if something out of fstab solves the problem, i don't have an issue. –  gcb Feb 15 '13 at 19:20

1 Answer 1

In fstab you can also use

uid=1000,gid=1000,permissions 0 2

to specify a user, group and permissions to make the mount more specific. If you put those 2 users in a new group and use that ID during the mount they own the disc and can write to it.

But ...

I would not mount the disc automatically at all and mount it only when those 2 users log into the system. Basically when those users log in, start a script that mounts the disc. If you still want a password you can enforce that in the script and if you add in a configuration file you could put the user names in there (so it is easy to add new or remove obsolete users).

share|improve this answer
i can't find the "permissions" option anywhere. man fstab does not list it. Should i have any specific version of some component? –  gcb Feb 15 '13 at 19:22
wait.Those are part of the options for mount linux.die.net/man/8/mount @gcb also see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab and the owner option. –  Rinzwind Feb 15 '13 at 19:26
permissions is a literal option or did you put it in the fstab line in the answer as a placeholder for something else? i can't find that option even on the mount man page you send... i'm confused, sorry :) –  gcb Feb 16 '13 at 0:34

Your Answer


