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Well, AskUbuntu insist this title is "The question you're asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed", I really don't see what is subjective here - all I want is ntfs-3g.usermap to succeed.

Trying to get permissions on an NTFS USB disk drive, I found How do I use 'chmod' on an NTFS (or FAT32) partition?, so I unmounted the drive and tried:

$ sudo ntfs-3g.usermap /dev/disk/by-label/MYNTFS 

This tool will help you to build a mapping of Windows users
to Linux users.
Be prepared to give Linux user id (uid) and group id (gid)
for owners of files which will be selected.
"/dev/disk/by-label/MYNTFS" opened

* Scanning "/dev/disk/by-label/MYNTFS" (two levels)
* Search for "Documents and Settings" and "Users"
* Search for other directories /
"/dev/disk/by-label/MYNTFS" closed

You have defined no user, no mapping can be built

Well, I do have a user ?! This drive was formatted on Mac OSX I remember, does that maybe have influence on this?

Why do I get this error - and how can I have ntfs-3g.usermap command to succeed?

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sdaau
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    Have you tried to mount just the disk instead of that particular location? –  Mar 28 '16 at 19:17
  • Thanks @Brian, but I'm not sure what you mean... – sdaau Mar 28 '16 at 19:41
  • As you figured out, it was searching for specific directories for windows users. My suggestion was to mount the disk at the root of it, instead of a path, which would hopefully return a list of windows users, however, as we now know, they were never going to be found. :) –  Mar 28 '16 at 20:02

1 Answers1

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Well, I think there has been a misunderstanding on my part: I thought ntfs-3g.usermap is to allow Linux users (and thus permissions) to function on an NTFS drive; what it does instead is try to map Windows users found on the drive to Linux users.

I guess this implies that one has to have Windows installed on that NTFS drive/partition - however, this is a removable drive with just "plain" files, and furthermore formatted on a Mac OSX, and as such there is no reason why it would have any Windows users defined - which explains why the command behaves as it does.

sdaau
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