hi! its my first post so any help is more than appreciated.
I was installing arch a few days ago and midway through the installation i decided i would finally give nixOS a go instead.
I am pretty okay using linux, i can problem solve decently if i get some cryptic error, i’ve done some gnarly configs and tried a bunch of distros, this to say im not super experienced but also not a newbie.
Anyway, preamble out the way, this is my actual problem:
my current setup has 3 drives
1 nvme ssd 256GB - NixOS install (normal linux partitioning in ext4, with swap and hibernate)
1 ssd 1TB - Shared ntfs drive (with ntfs-3g, but we will get there)
1 ssd 256GB - A windows install (don’t judge me, i do a lot of graphical work and i need affinity 
)
for clarity sake each OS has their own EFI partition on their own drive, i did this because windows corruption sometimes occurs, this way they never touch each other whatsoever.
My purpose is to have a separate drive for each OS and thats done, but i want to use the bigger 1TB drive as a shared drive for files like music, resources for graphical work, work documents, backups etc etc.
in arch. i would just use pacstrap during install to get ntfs-3g.
i would normally attribute a label to my shared drive with
ntfslabel /dev/drive MYBOY
and after booting into the user it would be as simple as editing the fstab file and writing out the options such as ( “|” to imply the tabs for formatting sake)
LABEL=MYBOY | /mnt/into/here | ntfs-3g | windows_names,wr,big_writes,noatime
this is kinda pseudo-code but you get the point, thing is in NixOS things go a bit different and im having a rough go at figuring it out
fileSystems."/mounting/point/to/MYBOY" = {
device = "LABEL= MYBOY";
fsType = "ntfs-3g";
options = ["windows_names""wr""big writes""noatime"];
};
the first problem i had had to do with NixOS complaining on boot that the /mounting/point/to/MYBOY does not exist, which had me at a loss for words since every place i could find said that the mounting points would be created at boot even if not there.
i got to the point where dolphin would recognize the drive label, and mounted if prompted with sudo permissions but it would mount to the default /run/media which i do not want. also this had to be done every boot and preferably i would want my system mounted from boot.
So i gave up on this method and tried the following:
https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/options.html#opt-fileSystems
suggested by someone on git, but i couldn’t get it to work on my machine.
This feels like a very scattered post, so sorry about that, i cant give a concise narration of all the things i’ve tried because i’ve been trying in many a ways so far.
do i have to do it with UUIDs? is ntfs just not accepted on boot by NixOS? i would imagine this could happen since ntfs-3g is a user package not a root one, but at this point its just guesswork.
I realize im just asking “please explain x” instead of pointing at a clear problem, in my defense NixOS feels so alien that i cant really point at a problem, if something goes wrong i cant decode the error trace to find out if its me.
Again, any help appreciated, i really want to learn this language and get my system to where i want it, thank you very much