Install Linux to an NTFS partition.

This guide focus on partition installtion. For directory installation, Nikola Pavlica’s guide may help.

• Initramfs is required.
• Initramfs helpers does not handle NTFS properly.

• NTFS-3G can map NTFS permissions to POSIX permissions, if the permissions option is (explicitly or implicitly) set on mount.
• Some builds of NTFS-3G may enable nosuid by default, and mount does not pass suid option to ntfs-3g.

• Poor performance.
• On shutdown or reboot, the system will halt but not poweroff or reset.

Arch Linux: follow the ArchWiki Installation guide page. Note that the permissions option is required when mounting the root partition.

Manjaro: do customised installation like Arch Linux.

• The manjaro-architect installer may help.
  • The “architect” iso is not required. You can run it from live media.
• If manjaro-architect used, mount the root partition with permissions to /mnt manually.

Arch Linux and Manjaro’s build of NTFS-3G enable nosuid by default. The ntfs-3g-fuse package works.

Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf:

• add fuse to the MODULES array;
• add mount.ntfs-3g to the BINARIES array.

Then regenerate initramfs.

• Add rootfstype=ntfs-3g and rootflags=permissions to kernel command line parameters.
• Make sure all required mount options have been add to kernel parameters, and remove root partition from /etc/fstab to avoid systemd’s auto remount, which is not supported by NTFS-3G.

WIP.