[SOLVED] Permissions on USB harddrive

[Canuck]

I backed up all of my home direction files and folders. NOW, on the external USB hard drive, they are all LOCKED. How do I unlock them so that I can open the files and or copy them to my other computer home partition?

[remoulder]

How did you back them up? How is the drive formatted and what are the permissions on the drive (right mouse | Properties)?

[Canuck]

The external HD was formatted ext3/ext4 according to properties. I copied the files from my home directory from another distribution. Copied over the entire Documents folder.
The folder and its contents are listed as haing
the permissions: Owner: 1000 -user #1000 Group: 1000
When I try to open any of these files/folders I get the "You are not the owner. You do not have permission to open this file"

An aside: if I copied the files to a USB stick and then over to the 2nd home partition, I do not have this problem.

[remoulder]

copied the files from my home directory from another distribution

Then the message is probably correct, your mint user is not the owner, the owner is your user in the other distro as the files would have been copied with that user's credentials.

Try in a terminal chown -R yourmintuser:yourmintgroup /media/mountpoint where yourmintuser/group is the name of your user and group (usually the same) and mountpoint is what the drive appears in nautilus as.