Mounting My Old Drives into Proxmox and to Share Them Over SMB (The Hard Way)

When I recently upgraded my home lab to Proxmox VE, I had two old drives filled with precious data — one NTFS and the other exFAT — both from older Windows setups. My goal was simple: mount them in Proxmox and make them available over the network using Samba (SMB), and ideally to my VMs and LXC containers.

What I thought would be a plug-and-play task turned into a mini-odyssey involving file system quirks, missing packages, permission errors, and some helpful Linux tricks. Here’s the full breakdown of what I learned — and how I made it all work, without losing a single byte.

The Setup

• Host: Proxmox VE (Debian-based)
• Drives:
  • /dev/sdb1 — NTFS (from a Windows backup drive)
  • /dev/sdc1 — exFAT (used for external file transfers)
• Goal: Mount both drives on the Proxmox host and share them using Samba over my network — accessible from Windows and Linux clients, and ideally from containers and VMs too.

Step 1: Identifying the Drives

First, I checked what was detected using:

lsblk -f

Sure enough, both drives were there, with their filesystems showing as ntfs and exfat.

Step 2: Installing File System Support

Out of the box, Proxmox didn’t support exFAT. I tried:

apt install exfat-utils

and was greeted with:

E: Package 'exfat-utils' has no installation candidate

Turns out exfat-utils is deprecated on newer Debian versions. The replacement?

apt install exfatprogs ntfs-3g

✅ That worked. I now had tools to mount both file systems safely without reformatting.

Step 3: Mounting the Drives

I created mount points:

mkdir /mnt/ntfs_drive
mkdir /mnt/exfat_drive

Then mounted the drives manually:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ntfs_drive
mount -t exfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/exfat_drive

And the files showed up. Success!

Well... partially.

Step 4: The Permissions Nightmare (exFAT)

I wanted to give my Samba user (smbuser) access to the mounted drives, so I ran:

chown -R smbuser:smbuser /mnt/exfat_drive

But I got:

Operation not permitted

That’s when I discovered exFAT doesn’t support Unix-style permissions. You can’t chown or chmod files on exFAT. You have to control access using mount options.

Here’s the workaround:

1. Find the UID and GID of the user:

id smbuser

Output:

uid=1001(smbuser) gid=1001(smbuser)

2. Unmount and remount using those IDs:

umount /mnt/exfat_drive
mount -t exfat -o uid=1001,gid=1001 /dev/sdc1 /mnt/exfat_drive

Now the entire drive looked "owned" by smbuser — Samba could work with it.

Step 5: Creating a Non-root Samba User

Don’t use root for Samba. That’s a terrible idea in any production or semi-public setup.

Instead, I created a user:

adduser smbuser
smbpasswd -a smbuser

Then in /etc/samba/smb.conf, I added:

[ntfs_drive]
   path = /mnt/ntfs_drive
   browseable = yes
   read only = no
   valid users = smbuser

[exfat_drive]
   path = /mnt/exfat_drive
   browseable = yes
   read only = no
   valid users = smbuser

Restarted Samba:

systemctl restart smbd

Boom! Shares were live.

Step 6: Making It Work Across VMs and Containers

This part’s interesting. There are two ways to access these shares inside a VM or container:

A. Mount the shares inside the VM/Container using SMB/CIFS:

mount -t cifs //proxmox-host/ntfs_drive /mnt/smb -o username=smbuser,password=yourpassword

B. For LXC Containers — use bind mounts:

Edit the container config:

nano /etc/pve/lxc/<CTID>.conf

Add:

mp0: /mnt/ntfs_drive,mp=/mnt/ntfs_drive
mp1: /mnt/exfat_drive,mp=/mnt/exfat_drive

Restart the container:

pct reboot <CTID>

Now the drives are inside the container, ready to be re-shared or used however you want.

What I’d Do Differently Next Time

If I were starting from scratch, I’d consider:

• Backing up the data and reformatting both drives to ext4 for full Linux compatibility
• Keeping Samba shares in containers, not the host, for better isolation

But for now, it works.

Here you can find the No BS Readme on the Github page :

If you’ve ever tried to mount an NTFS or exFAT drive on Proxmox and run into weird permission issues — you’re not alone. I hope this post saves you some time (and frustration).