I recently set up a new dual-boot system with Ubuntu and Windows 10. The computer has an internal 256gb SSD, which contains the operating system partitions, and a 2tb HDD, formatted NTFS, which contains files that are shared between the two systems. The NTFS volume is mounted in fstab as /DATA/, and this folder appears in the Ubuntu file explorer:
Text and image files on the volume can be edited without issue, and some programs can access it just fine -- for example, Firefox will save files to /home/[user]/Download, which is a symlink to /DATA/Downloads.
I have several video files of different types on this volume, and none of them are able to play with VLC, nor are they able to play with the pre-installed Videos application. This error message appears when attempting to open the video files in VLC:
I tried to find the log file, but despite turning on the log-to-file option (With debug verbosity) in preferences and supplying a non-read-only path for the file, no log file appeared.
If I move the video files out of /DATA/ and onto the ext4 volume, they play without issue. It may also be worth noting that video files on the Windows system partition, which is also NTFS but is NOT mounted in fstab and is accessed through "Other Locations," play without issue.
Upon further investigation, multiple applications that have the option to open files using a "Browse" feature are unable to access the /DATA/ folder. Here is a screenshot of the file explorer interface when attempting to open a video file through an already-open VLC window:
As you can see, /DATA/ is absent. This screenshot is of the file browser in Discord, which is also unable to access the /DATA/ folder:
The drag-and-drop functionality in Discord also does not work.
The entry for this drive in /etc/fstab is the following:
UUID=[redacted] /DATA ntfs defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
I also tried using this alternative line, following an online tutorial, but it didn't seem to change anything.
UUID=[redacted] /DATA ntfs-3g defaults,nls=utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=022 0 0
Thanks in advance for any help! I'd like to use Ubuntu more, but this pesky issue is unfortunately causing me to stay on the Windows side of my machine more than I'd like.
EDIT: It has been suggested that this issue is a duplicate of an issue relating to snaps accessing removable media. The fix for this other issue is changing a setting within Ubuntu Software; however, I found this setting to be set to the "correct" value by default. Curiously, even with the setting enabled, the snap version of VLC is still unable to access actual removable media (in addition to the non-removable drive mounted to /DATA/), so it appears that this option does not function properly for VLC at all. The apt-get version, however, can access everything.
