boreal current
taking an old 4tb drive from my windows install and formatted it to exfat, along with mounting it in /media/disk
I wanted to use it for a plex server, but I seem to not have permission to edit and read it's contents.
I am using i3 if that changes things, along with installing plex through the .deb package supplied by plex.
interestingly using fdisk -l says permission denied on most everything
stable tusk
You need root privileges to tinker with hard drives. This is usually achieved by prefacing your commands with sudo , which will then prompt you for your password.
How have you mounted the drive anyway?
boreal current
Mkfs and mount, I have been using sudo, just was really late last night and I forgot😂, theres no sudo for cd and thats my problem i cant navigate into my drive or add files.
I have it mounted to /media/disk
stable tusk
I was just looking at the fdisk command lacking sudo, which will of course not work. And I was not asking about the mount point, but how you are mounting it. Via fstab? Via Disks GUI tool? Manually?
boreal current
Manually, I looked into fstab, but it was a read only file and wouldn't let me write (plus I had no idea what I was doing)
stable tusk
If you are unsure, it is a good idea to keep out of fstab. Could you please share the output of lsblk? That will list all your block devices, which includes hard drives.
boreal current
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0 7:0 0 4K 1 loop /snap/bare/5
loop1 7:1 0 90.6M 1 loop /snap/bitwarden/103
loop2 7:2 0 105.8M 1 loop /snap/core/16202
loop3 7:3 0 55.7M 1 loop /snap/core18/2812
loop4 7:4 0 74.1M 1 loop /snap/core22/1033
loop5 7:5 0 97.7M 1 loop /snap/discord/176
loop6 7:6 0 164.8M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/198
loop7 7:7 0 497M 1 loop /snap/gnome-42-2204/141
loop8 7:8 0 229.8M 1 loop /snap/godot-4/4
loop9 7:9 0 91.7M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1535
loop10 7:10 0 20K 1 loop /snap/hello-world/29
sda 8:0 0 3.6T 0 disk
nvme0n1 259:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 465.3G 0 part /
stable tusk
That one is your 4TB HDD: sda 8:0 0 3.6T 0 disk. It does not appear to be partitioned, otherwise you would see the partitions in the lines underneath it, same as with the nvme SSD at the bottom. So if you are sure it was partitioned, Windows might still be locking it somehow. Or it never was partitioned.
boreal current
I am not dual booting, is there a way windows could lock the drive?
stable tusk
Is that drive supposed to be empty, or are there files on it that you need?
boreal current
no there are no files I need it's empty
stable tusk
Then you should just open the Disks tool from the start menu and select the drive. Feel free to share a screenshot of how it looks in there.
boreal current
stable tusk
That is formatted in ext4, a common Linux filesystem. Didn't you say it was supposed to be exfat?
Because exfat could also be read by Windows, but this cannot without extra tools.
boreal current
well they are pretty close I just confused the two, and idc if it's read by windows not using it anyways
stable tusk
Then you can just click the play button, and it will be mounted.
It should show up in Nemo as a device, and I expect it to be writable.
boreal current
ok, it's mounted but I still don't have permissions to view the contents
heres a image
stable tusk
What error does it give? Have you tried the mount point shown in Disks? Should be clickable.
boreal current
that is clicking on the disk
stable tusk
Alright. Please unmount it for a moment with the stop button, then enter this on a terminal: sudo chown jamie:jamie /media/jamie/bigChonkie, then mount and try again.
boreal current
chown: cannot access '/media/jamie/bigChonkie': No such file or directory
the folder bigChonkie is no longer inside jamie.
that's expected right?
stable tusk
Well, it is being pissy today. Try sudo chown jamie:jamie /media/jamie/* - this is to make sure you actually own that mount point.
boreal current
zsh: no matches found: /media/jamie/*
stable tusk
The thing here is, this is mounted to a temporary directory, which apparently gets entirely removed when it is not in use. So when it is created again, it somehow gets created without you having access to it. This points to something being broken with your user, since this would just work in a plain Mint install. I have no idea what broke here.
boreal current
hmmm, I have the snapshots thing enabled, I think that gives me options yes? I could revert the files to the first snapshot and try that?
stable tusk
You could. But how did you create your user account? Let the installer create it, or made it yourself?
boreal current
I let the installer create it.
stable tusk
You are lacking rights, or some group membership for this. But whatever - please run blkid and copy the UUID of your 4TB drive somewhere you can get it back from, text file or something.
boreal current
ok, done
stable tusk
Then you want to add a line to your fstab to mount that drive always. Like so UUID=<insert here> /media/jamie/bigChonkie ext4 defaults 0 0
You can sudo xed /etc/fstab to get in there. And make sure to insert the UUID that you copied.
When you are done, save it and quit. You can then sudo mount -a to mount everything, which should now include that fstab line.
boreal current
ok, that's done.
stable tusk
If you did that last command, look for your drive. Should be mounted.
boreal current
yep it is
stable tusk
Did that solve your problem, or are you still unable to access it?
boreal current
still can't access it.
stable tusk
Try sudo chmod 777 /media/jamie/bigChonkie
boreal current
IT WORKS!
stable tusk
Permissions had to be refreshed.
Should stick now. The fstab entry will auto-mount the drive on every boot. If it should fail (sometimes does for me), re-run sudo mount -a.
Check if you can write to it, too.
boreal current
thanks sooo much, and yes I can write to it!
stable tusk
Glad it works. Feel free to mark this thread solved if you are done.
mighty turret
chown: cannot access '/media/jamie/bigChonkie': No such file or directory
the fo...
hit the play button to remount it. it needs to be mounted to change owner as was mentioned there