Plex Media Sever Can't Access External Hard Drive Files [SOLVED]

[Luv4Cheese]

I have went through the forums trying to figure out how to give Plex permission to access my movie files on my external hard drive, but after trying all of the suggestions in this forum I still can't get it to work. Plex recognizes my external hard drive, but I am not able to access any of the files. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. I have spent several hours trying to figure this out.

[spamegg]

Totally overkill: give everyone permission: sudo chmod -R o+rwx /path/to/your/external/drive

[Luv4Cheese]

I'm new to Linux, so how do I add the last part to locate my "Seagate Portable Drive"? It's mounted in "DEVICES" and called "Seagate Portable Drive". When I open the external drive it has it listed above as "media, linux, Seagate Portable Drive". I tried "sudo chmod -R o+rwx /media/linux/Seagate\040Portable\040Drive" in Terminal and recieved the following error message: "chmod: cannot access 'Portable': No such file or directory chmod: changing permissions of 'Drive': Operation not permitted". Plex has the drive location as "/media/linux/Seagate\040Portable\040Drive".

[ajgreeny]

You will need to find the real mountpoint of the external drive, not the device name which is not how you change permissions.

How is the drive mounted? Is it permanently mounted or only when attached?

Give the partition on the drive a label which is the best way to set a permanent mountpoint for a USB disk as it will always mount at /media/<user>/label, where <user> is your username.

In your post you show "/media/linux/Seagate Portable Drive" which unless your username is linux will never work.
Also the spaces in "Seagate Portable Drive" would need to be escaped either with a backslash or by using quotation marks for the pathway, ie,
/media/linux/Seagate\ Portable\ Drive
or
"/media/linux/Seagate\ Portable\ Drive"

Show us the output of ls -l /media with the external drive attached and mounted and we can help you more.

[Luv4Cheese]

linux@XFCE:~$ ls -l /media
total 12
drwxr-x---+ 3 root root 4096 Jun 6 12:33 linux
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 6 12:13 Plex
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 6 12:27 Seagate
linux@XFCE:~$

[mikeflan]

Please give the output of

Code: Select all

df -h

[AndyMH]

I'm new to Linux, so how do I add the last part to locate my "Seagate Portable Drive"? It's mounted in "DEVICES" and called "Seagate Portable Drive". When I open the external drive it has it listed above as "media, linux, Seagate Portable Drive".

If when you open your file manager and it looks like this:

click the button highlighted and it will look like this:

You can now see the full path. So click on "Seagate Portable Drive" in devices and it will tell you where it is mounted at the top, it will be something like /media/your_username/something_else. If you have spaces in there you will need to put quotes around it in any terminal command, e.g. "/media/your username/something else".

[Luv4Cheese]

linux@Xfce:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 383M 1.4M 381M 1% /run
/dev/sda2 457G 23G 412G 6% /
tmpfs 1.9G 4.0K 1.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1 511M 7.9M 504M 2% /boot/efi
tmpfs 383M 16K 383M 1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdb2 4.6T 842G 3.8T 19% /media/linux/Seagate Portable Drive
linux@Xfce:~$

[altair4]

Some random observations:

*** "linux" is a user name on this system.

*** Unless Plex fixed their design flaw it runs as the user: "plex".

*** Because of the special permissions on /media/linux ( that is what the + sign is when you do an ls ) the only user that will get to the Seagate Portable Drive is "linux" not "plex"

So you are either going to have to figure out how to run plex as "linux" not "plex" or change your mount point so that it is not under /media/linux.

*** also unknown is the filesystem that is mounted to /media/linux/Seagate Portable Drive. Ext4, NTFS, FAT32, ......

*** I personally have no idea about this but is Plex installed from something outside of the repositories, part of the repositories, or is it a flatpak which will bring in another level of complexity to all this.

[Luv4Cheese]

SOLVED Big shout out to everyone on "Official Linux Mint Support Channel" on HexChat. Without them, I would have never been able to solve this issue. Apparently my hard drive was NTFS formatted (common on Windows 10) and needed to be mounted properly on Linux Mint. Then my Plex Media Server was able to read the directories inside to play my media files.

This is what solved the problem (Step By Step):

linux@Xfce:~$ sudo umount /dev/sdb2
linux@Xfce:~$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/Seagate
linux@Xfce:~$ sudo mount -t ntfs -o defaults,uid=999,gid=1000 /dev/sdb2 /mnt/Seagate

This will TEMPORARILY mount your NTFS external hard drive. It will only work until you reboot your PC. To mount your hard drive long term you will have to follow the steps below:

The next and final step will mount your NTFS hard drive to the "mnt" directory found in "File System". Your hard drive will be located there after a reboot from then on.

linux@Xfce:~$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

*then type the following below*

/dev/sdb2 /mnt/Seagate ntfs defaults,uid=999,gid=1000 0 0

*then save and exit by pressing (CTRL+X)*

[venom82]

i did as stated while making temp records until i get the following
venom@venom-server:~$ sudo umount/dev/sdb1
[sudo] password for venom:
sudo: umount/dev/sdb1: command not found
venom@venom-server:~$ sudo umount /dev/sdb1
venom@venom-server:~$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/2.0\TB\Volume
venom@venom-server:~$ sudo mount -t nfts -o defaults,uid=999,gid=1000 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/2.0\TB\Volume
mount: /mnt/2.0TBVolume: unknown filesystem type 'nfts'.
venom@venom-server:~$

[AndyMH]

ntfs not nfts

[venom82]

ntfs not nfts

lol i saw it after posting. LONG few nights. have been making alot of typos. im new to linux. ask me a windows question im sure to have an answer. yes the comand worked like a dream and i am extremely thankful to run into it. and if it was not for the community as a whole we nubs would STILL be scratching our heads. thanks for responding to my mistake. i have a master on speed dial but as of late his job wife and kid take presence and thus time helping me learn is down to 5 mins a day even a week.

[Tigermateray]

SOLVED Big shout out to everyone on "Official Linux Mint Support Channel" on HexChat. Without them, I would have never been able to solve this issue. Apparently my hard drive was NTFS formatted (common on Windows 10) and needed to be mounted properly on Linux Mint. Then my Plex Media Server was able to read the directories inside to play my media files.

This is what solved the problem (Step By Step):

linux@Xfce:~$ sudo umount /dev/sdb2
linux@Xfce:~$ sudo mkdir -p /mnt/Seagate
linux@Xfce:~$ sudo mount -t ntfs -o defaults,uid=999,gid=1000 /dev/sdb2 /mnt/Seagate

This will TEMPORARILY mount your NTFS external hard drive. It will only work until you reboot your PC. To mount your hard drive long term you will have to follow the steps below:

The next and final step will mount your NTFS hard drive to the "mnt" directory found in "File System". Your hard drive will be located there after a reboot from then on.

linux@Xfce:~$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

*then type the following below*

/dev/sdb2 /mnt/Seagate ntfs defaults,uid=999,gid=1000 0 0

*then save and exit by pressing (CTRL+X)*

You are a life saver man. Created an account just so that I could thank you. I have been researching on how to fix the directory issue for days. This works like a charm using an external usb drive. Also relatively new to Linux, Cheers bud.