permissions

[moheganer2]

i recently installed mint and like it very much.I have an external hard drive that i keep media files on from windows.i can read them and play them on amorok and mplayer but cant write them or delete them.I am not the owner dont have permission.Is there a way to change this? Who is the owner?Any help would be appreciated or a place to get help.

[Husse]

Welcome to Mint moheganer2

media files on from windows

Does this mean that it's ntfs or Fat32?
If so they get automounted by mintDisk
Give us some more information so we can help you.

[moheganer2]

the hd is ntfs 60gb-has media files- listed as disk on the desktop-can read and play the files-in /media/disk file-cant write or delete files- do not have permission

[scorp123]

the hd is ntfs 60gb

NTFS is a undocumented + closed-source Microsoft technology. I suggest you use Linux-native file systems instead? e.g. Ext3?

[Husse]

You got scorp123's auto reply
He does not like M$
But he is right.
If you can't change from ntfs we must fix the problem
Take a look in /etc/fstab
If your external drive is listed there in ANY way mintDisk will not mount it.
If so back up fstab (sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak1)
and then open it and delete the entry for this disk (but nothing else) - you need sudo to do that.
Now it should be mounted r/w - if not post back and we'll dig deeper

[moheganer2]

thanks to those who replied to my question. I reinstalled Mint and somehow established myself as owner instead of root.In any case, ican now read, write, and delete anything in external hd even though they are ntfs.I have tried 6 or 7 distros and have never had this happen or have anyone been able to get this result. A miracle!

[Husse]

A miracle!

That has existed in Mint since Bianca
God luck!

[gman]

This is an Ubuntu based problem. In reviews of Ubuntu the issue of not being able to have read/write access to external drives is an issue. It is hit and miss. I have an external drive that when mounted on my home laptop I have write permissions and at work when I mount my work laptop I do not have write permissions.

I have never had this problem with PCLinuxOS or other non-ubuntu distros.

[r76]

This problem doesn't arise just because the disk is NTFS formatted - I formatted an external USB drive as Ext3 for maximum compatibility and to be able to handle large files (which FAT32 cannot) and still had the same problem.

I'm not exactly sure what the problem is but I used Windows to rename the volume (this is dead easy to do in Windows, I think it's right-click, properties, and type a name for the volume label or something like that - it was really instinctive anyway). I called my drive 'seagate' and have had no problems with it in any linux system since mounting as such and giving me read/write permissions every time. Possibly I had in the past tried to mount manually or change ownership resulting in my drive receiving an fstab entry.

I was able to label the Ext3 drive using Windows because I've installed the Ext2 IFS driver in Windows - so I have read/write access from both Windows and Linux.

[Husse]

Two things
1) To label a disk in Mint is easy, when you've learned how to do it You use f2label, see man f2label (needs sudo)
2) It seems that connecting a USB disk when the computer is already running gives a read only disk. If it's connected all through the boot you get R/W

[JimH]

I am having the same problem with permissions. I had Mint installed and I had a seperate HD with NTFS, and I was able to read/write to it. I had to re-install Mint and now I have no permission. Like gman said, I believe it is hit or miss...

Jim