How to change drive ownership from root?

[dirtyernie]

How do I gain permission/ownership of a added on HD currently owned by root?

Just installed 500gb hard-drive as an external drive. root is owner and I want to take ownership to read and write to drive?
I know this can be done through the terminal but cannot find an example to get me there. Any help is appreciated. I know how to become rooot user but how to change the drive permissions?

[austin.texas]

How do I gain permission/ownership of a added on HD currently owned by root?

Just installed 500gb hard-drive as an external drive. root is owner and I want to take ownership to read and write to drive?
I know this can be done through the terminal but cannot find an example to get me there. Any help is appreciated. I know how to become rooot user but how to change the drive permissions?

You don't want to become root user.
When logged in as the ordinary administrative user, take ownership of the mount point with the command:

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sudo chown $USER:$USER /media/<username>/<mountpoint>

Discover the actual <mountpoint> with the command:

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lsblk

[Flemur]

Just installed 500gb hard-drive as an external drive. root is owner and I want to take ownership to read and write to drive?

Actually nobody owns the drive itself: directories on partitions are owned and have permissions.
Is it a new drive?
Is it partitioned?
What kind of partition(s)?
What makes you think root owns stuff?

[dirtyernie]

It is not a new drive. I formatted the drive in ext4 in Gparted.
When the drive is mounted it will not let me save files to it.
Right clicking drive under Properties/permissions it says drive is owned by root and is in Group root.
I don,t understand quite know to proceed from this point?

[dirtyernie]

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sblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 931.5G 0 part /media/greg541/3ac9aff5-7b2
sdb 8:16 0 465.8G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 465.8G 0 part /media/greg541/985ab4a5-64b
sdc 8:32 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─sdc1 8:33 0 243M 0 part /boot
├─sdc2 8:34 0 1K 0 part
└─sdc5 8:37 0 931.3G 0 part
├─mint--vg-root (dm-0) 252:0 0 915.5G 0 lvm /
└─mint--vg-swap_1 (dm-1) 252:1 0 15.7G 0 lvm [SWAP]

[austin.texas]

Just follow the instruction I gave you:

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sudo chown $USER:$USER /media/<username>/<mountpoint>

In this case that would be:

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sudo chown $USER:$USER /media/greg541/985ab4a5-64b

[dirtyernie]

Thanks that worked.

[theraja57]

Sorry about tagging on an old post but I'm having the same issue and I suspect there's maybe a syntax issue. I'm running Mint 19. No problem formatting the new HDD but getting current info on how to get r/w access has been frustrating. When I type the command line as austin.texas suggests the reply is chown: cannot access '/media/my username/f559-c14a. My mount point for sda1 (my new HDD partition) is shown as /mnt/f559c14a. I tried including the "mnt" part of the path in the command line in different locations but got the same message. I don't know if the method has been updated or my syntax is incorrect. Anyone know the current quick way to get this drive r/w? Thanks!

[mediclaser]

Sorry about tagging on an old post but I'm having the same issue and I suspect there's maybe a syntax issue. I'm running Mint 19. No problem formatting the new HDD but getting current info on how to get r/w access has been frustrating. When I type the command line as austin.texas suggests the reply is chown: cannot access '/media/my username/f559-c14a. My mount point for sda1 (my new HDD partition) is shown as /mnt/f559c14a. I tried including the "mnt" part of the path in the command line in different locations but got the same message. I don't know if the method has been updated or my syntax is incorrect. Anyone know the current quick way to get this drive r/w? Thanks!

Please post what you get when you do lsblk in the terminal.

[52ROSt]

LM17.3 KDE

I found this old thread as it matches exactly my problem however I am doing something wrong and appreciate your help

I ran lsblk and get:

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rost@rost-X240:~ > lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   477G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0  29.8G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0   7.7G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda3   8:3    0   394G  0 part /home
sdb      8:16   0   1.8T  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   0   1.8T  0 part 
sdc      8:32   0   1.8T  0 disk 
└─sdc1   8:33   0   1.8T  0 part 
sdd      8:48   0   1.8T  0 disk 
├─sdd1   8:49   0   1.2T  0 part /media/rost/HDD3_iodata
└─sdd2   8:50   0   667G  0 part /media/rost/680GBForImage
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
rost@rost-X240:~ > 

I need to change rights from root to me (rost, have admin rights) and used chown command in following form:

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rost@rost-X240:~ > sudo chown $rost:$rost /media/rost/680GBForImage
rost@rost-X240:~ > 

I as I was not sure about the "$" I also tried the command in this form:

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rost@rost-X240:~ > sudo chown rost:rost /media/rost/680GBForImage
rost@rost-X240:~ > 

Result is both cases no reaction at the terminal.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[52ROSt]

LM17.3 KDE

I found this old thread as it matches exactly my problem however I am doing something wrong and appreciate your help

I ran

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lsblk

and got:

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rost@rost-X240:~ > lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   477G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0  29.8G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0   7.7G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda3   8:3    0   394G  0 part /home
sdb      8:16   0   1.8T  0 disk 
└─sdb1   8:17   0   1.8T  0 part 
sdc      8:32   0   1.8T  0 disk 
└─sdc1   8:33   0   1.8T  0 part 
sdd      8:48   0   1.8T  0 disk 
├─sdd1   8:49   0   1.2T  0 part /media/rost/HDD3_iodata
└─sdd2   8:50   0   667G  0 part /media/rost/680GBForImage
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
rost@rost-X240:~ > 

I need to change rights from root to me (=rost, have admin rights) and used

chown

command in following form:

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rost@rost-X240:~ > sudo chown $rost:$rost /media/rost/680GBForImage
rost@rost-X240:~ > 

As I was not sure about the "$" I also tried the command in this form:

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rost@rost-X240:~ > sudo chown rost:rost /media/rost/680GBForImage
rost@rost-X240:~ > 

Result is both cases no reaction at the terminal.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[mediclaser]

52ROSt, try this:

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sudo chown rost:rost /media/rost/680GBForImage -R

[52ROSt]

Thanks for your help. I could change the ownership

I used first:

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rost@rost-X240:~ > sudo chown rost:rost /media/rost/680GBForImage -R
rost@rost-X240:~ >

As there was no reaction from the machine I also tried to add the "$" in front of name und group name

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rost@rost-X240:~ > sudo chown $rost:$rost /media/rost/680GBForImage -R
rost@rost-X240:~ > 

Again no reaction from the machine.

However I checked the partition directly and one of the commands I used changed the ownership. Thus if someone has the same problem, I recommend to try all commands I used and check after each command the ownership of the partition. This is necessary because I did not get any information at the terminal screen that the ownership was changed.

[mediclaser]

There are many terminal commands which don't display any message when the command is successful, and chown is one of those. By the way the -R option is to make sure the existing sub-directories (sub-folders) and their files are also affected by the ownership change.

[52ROSt]

Thanks for your additional information.

If learned something. The hard way! Hope it helps someone else.

[razorrob]

Hi everyone

Hope you can help. I'm having similar problem, i followed the instructions here .. but no luck. I just installed an extra HDD drive on my laptop via eSATA internally and wanted to use it to put most of my files. But as others, its owned by root and root group.
I get ...

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chown: cannot access '/media/rob/Lix': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Work': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Files': No such file or directory

Please help!
This is the full bit i tried which includes my mount info ...

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sudo] password for rob: 
chown: cannot access '/media/rob/Lix': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Work': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Files': No such file or directory

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rob@rob-Dell-linux:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
loop0    7:0    0  56.2M  1 loop /snap/bitwarden/33
loop1    7:1    0 184.1M  1 loop /snap/blender/51
loop2    7:2    0  97.9M  1 loop /snap/core/10577
loop3    7:3    0  55.4M  1 loop /snap/core18/1944
loop4    7:4    0 162.9M  1 loop /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/145
loop5    7:5    0 217.9M  1 loop /snap/gnome-3-34-1804/60
loop6    7:6    0  66.5M  1 loop /snap/thunderbird/97
loop7    7:7    0  64.8M  1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1514
sda      8:0    0 223.6G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   100M  0 part 
├─sda2   8:2    0 111.5G  0 part /media/rob/263C88E13C88ACFD
├─sda3   8:3    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda5   8:5    0   953M  0 part /boot
├─sda6   8:6    0  18.8G  0 part /
├─sda7   8:7    0  74.5G  0 part /home
└─sda8   8:8    0  17.7G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   0 698.7G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0     1K  0 part 
├─sdb5   8:21   0  13.7G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sdb6   8:22   0  13.7G  0 part 
├─sdb7   8:23   0  78.5G  0 part /media/rob/Lix Work Files
├─sdb8   8:24   0  68.4G  0 part /media/rob/Win Work Files
└─sdb9   8:25   0 524.4G  0 part /media/rob/StorageX

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rob@rob-Dell-linux:~$ sudo chown $rob:$rob /media/rob/Lix Work Files
chown: cannot access '/media/rob/Lix': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Work': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Files': No such file or directory

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rob@rob-Dell-linux:~$ sudo chown rob:rob /media/rob/Lix Work Files
chown: cannot access '/media/rob/Lix': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Work': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access 'Files': No such file or directory

[Larry78723]

There is no Lix mount point. Also, mount points with spaces in the name have to be enclosed in double quotes. For example:

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sudo chown $rob:$rob /media/rob/Lix Work Files

should be

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sudo chown $USER:$USER /media/rob/"Lix Work Files"

You don't need to change $USER:$USER because it is interpreted as the currently logged in user.