Linux Mint: NTFS formatted shared drive and padlocks issue when dual booting with Windows 11

[Dave3000]

I used to have a dual-boot setup with Linux Mint 21.2 and Windows 11 Pro and I noticed that in my shared drive, which is formatted in NTFS, ends up showing padlocks in Linux Mint in the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, and Music folders in that shared drive. This makes those folders on that drive for the owner and group to only have Access permissions and only the root user has the Create and Delete permissions. I thought that NTFS formatted partitions have their permissions discarded when using Linux and therefore I should be able to write to every folder in the NTFS formatted drive in Linux by default. This is a USB SSD I'm referring to. I had fast startup and hibernation disabled in the power management settings in Windows. One thing I did was change after installing Windows 11 was redirect the folder location for the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, and Music folder in Windows to the USB SSD. Does that have anything to do with locking out those folders for write access in Linux? As a workaround I did a sudo chown -R david:david /media/david/Data and then sudo chmod -R 775 /media/david/Data, and then edited the fstab to create an entry for NTFS formatted partition of that USB SSD. However, should I have to do all that with an NTFS formatted partition, especially if Linux ignores the permissions for NTFS formatted partitions? Am I misunderstanding something here? Does Linux by default actually lock out write access to folders created in Windows that have certain permissions set in Windows? One more thing, in the past I would be getting padlocks in several other folders that I backed up in my backup drive which was also formatted in NTFS and I also had fast startup and hibernation disabled at the time. I ended up giving up on dual-boot due to both operating systems interfering with each other in some way such as the issue I described in this post, despite being installed on separate drives.

 

[mikeymikec]

Dammit, I wrote most of my post, accidentally went back a page and lost it all.

I'm not a Linux expert but I'll try to help. I run Mint 21.1 and Win10 and I can march straight into my Windows user folder without any special permissions. Admittedly it isn't auto-mounted because I rarely need it, and when it's auto-mounted the mount point is /media/mike/Windows 10 so it looks like it's done entirely with my own user privs without any escalation.

Most of my essential-day-to-day data is in my home directory so no permissions issues there, and I have a separate data drive formatted as NTFS which both OSs can read/write. My only permissions issue ever with NTFS was with the mount point and I keep the correct fstab config in my linux journal. The entry looks approximately like this:

/dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxx /mnt/mountpoint auto uid=myuid,big_writes,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

I vaguely remember that at some point I had to chown the mount point folder but I would have thought that if I had to do that to get my main data drive connected then I would have been sensible and documented that as well. I've also set up VirtualBox with access to various locations on the host so I might be mis-remembering that as being related to this.

My only thought is that your issues are related to how the partition is being mounted, and I think you're correct in that Linux completely ignores Windows permissions as the latter is - to my understanding - implemented in a completely different manner.

I've seen Linux (I think Mint, I've gone through a few distros since 2018 before settling on Mint for the foreseeable future) do some odd things with attaching emblems to folders and never understanding why despite asking on the Linux Mint support forum