Ubuntu 11.10 ATI drivers and NTFS mounts problem

Hi there again Ubuntu users.

This will be a small post about a problem I faced when I upgraded to 11.10 and it has to do with ATI drivers and NTFS mounts. I ' ve googled them around and I see that there are quite some people facing similar problems.

(I run the 64-bit version, so I do not know if the same applies for the 32-bit one.)

I use two monitors and when the PC rebooted, after the update, the monitor mode had been switched to mirror monitors. I though OK, no problem. It is something that has happened before in the past and I thought that AMD Catalyst Control Center will give the solution. Unfortunately, even though I was using the AMD Catalyst Control Center (administrative version) it didn't save any changes and simply terminated. Each time.

So I tried to "kill my time" and watch a movie instead. I tried to cut and paste a movie to an external media center. No go. I didn't have write privs in the NTFS external HDD. That was new. It took a while (reading around the community forums etc) and I came to the conclusion that must be a policy problem. This triggered me and I thought that it might also be the solution to the ATI drivers problem.

Enough said (damn it was long)

I am rookie andI didn't want to mess around any /etc/ .... conf files, so i did it manually the "newbie" way. I suggest try it only since it might not be the solution to your problem. I believe the community and Canonical will provide solution to both problem in future updates. Until then we have to be operational at least.

ATI problem solution
Simply download the proprietary drivers form the system settings section and run the AMD Catalyst Control Center (administrative version) from terminal
$gksudo amdcccle

That's all. It will work just fine (use gksudo, not sudo since it is a GUI app).

NTFS mounts problem
The solution is seperated in two parts. Mounting and unmounting.

Mounting
First you will need to know which device to mount. To list the connected HDD devices type
$sudo fdisk -l

It will list several devices and their partitions. The format will like this:


Disk /dev/sda: 60.0 GB, 60022480896 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7297 cylinders, total 117231408 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00006d97


Device
Boot
Start
End
Blocks
Id
System
/dev/sda1
*
2048
391167
194560
83
Linux
/dev/sda2


393214
117229567
58418177
5
Extended
/dev/sda5


393216
16015359
7811072
83
Linux
/dev/sda6


16017408
113324031
48653312
83
Linux
/dev/sda7


113326080
117229567
1951744
82
Linux swap/SOlaris


/dev/sda is the device
The rest in the table are the partitions.

Type
$sudo mount .... partition to mount it.

Done.

Unmount
You' ll need same privs to unmount the devices mounted before.

First list the mounted devices. Type
$mount | grep /dev/
and the mounted devices will be highlighted. Find the one you want and then
$sudo umount [device]

That's all. 

Maybe fstab can be edited, but I am not in position to recommend it. I hope a near future update will deal with these problems.

Try it and I hope it will help. Additional info about Ubuntu device management can be found here.

Comments