Permissions

[Paul L]

I'm having trouble with permissions when accessing separate hard disks on my PC. I have my main hard disk with Mint 5 on it and then a further two SATA drives which are divided each into four partitions (Music,Download,Documents,Photos) - one is a backup of the other. I've managed to automount the first disk and can happily view and read all the files. I didn't automount the back-up to prevent me accidentally deleting files.

While I can view the files I can't edit them (particularly annoying on the documents). I've read a great number of notes in the forum and have tried a couple without success.

Does anyone know of a way to easily change the permissions on a partition so that I can edit my files?

I've tried "sudo chmod 777 -R /media/DOCUMENTS" which didn't work.

Any help appreciated.

Paul

[Fred]

Paul L,

Ok... let me get this right. You have 3 drives, each with one or more partitions. Two of those drives you can access all the partitions from your mint install. You want to have access to the other drive partitions. All correct?

Can you see the 3rd drive partitions from mint? If so How? In /media/sdcx or something like that?

What kind of partitions are these? NTFS, ext3, fat32.... ?

Fred

[Paul L]

I have three drives - I can see them all but cannot write to the second or third drive (sdd and sde). I've automounted sdd and can access the files read-only. Additionally, I can't copy files to the drive as I don't have permissions. I just want to be able to access and edit the files on sdd.

Hope this clarifies my position.

Paul

[Paul L]

The drives are both SATA and are formatted as FAT32

Paul

[Fred]

Paul L,

I am assuming you have the correct line to mount in /etc/fstab

I am assuming you have a folder in /media called sdd

Go to /media, highlight it, and right click and select edit as root.

Then right click on the sdd folder, properties, permissions and set them to read and write for everybody. Change the owner to your user name and check the little box that says apply to all sub folders. Ok it and close.

You should now have access, read and write to that folder and it's contents.

Fred

[Paul L]

Thanks Fred,

I tried your suggestion - but it didn't work.

I clicked on sdd under /media and received the following message "running Xfe as root".
Clicking on OK gave me the message "Mount point /home/paul/.gvfs is not responding"
Clicking on OK took me to Xfe - looks like explorer
Right clicking on the partition DOCUMENTS gave me the permissions and allowed me to tick group and user write, and to change the user and group owners to paul
Clicking on OK came up with a message "changing permissions...."
After a few seconds the message was replaced with "chown failed in /media/DOCUMENTS/filename resource temporarily unavailable.

I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help

Paul

[Paul L]

After much hassle and beating of chest I solved it.

Fired up WIndows and reformatted my drives as NTFS not FAT32 (I saved the data first and then copied it back - always thinking!)

Then when I edited fstab it worked!!
UUID=A0D45FA0D45F780C /media/MUSIC ntfs-3g rw,user,auto,exec,utf8 0 0
UUID=1014712014710A4C /media/DOWNLOADS ntfs-3g rw,user,auto,exec,utf8 0 0
UUID=CE3C1F713C1F5435 /media/DOCUMENTS ntfs-3g rw,user,auto,exec,utf8 0 0
UUID=90A87240A872253E /media/PHOTOGRAPHS ntfs-3g rw,user,auto,exec,utf8 0 0

PS I used Windows to format the drives because I'm more familiar with doing it that way - I'm sure I could have done it just as easily in Mint - always learning!!

Paul L

[MagnusB]

FAT32 is somewhat troublesome in Linux, and in most cases you have to make an entry in your fstab to make them mount with Read/Write access, even if they are external USB drives. Not that your solution would have worked for FAT32 partitions as well, you just have to change ntfs-3g to vfat.