No permissions to external drive

Message

ahd123 · Post by **ahd123** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 10:49 pm

I can access my external drive fine when running as root, so I know it's a problem with my normal user account's permissions.

I'm logged in under my normal user account which I named "User".
UserID: 500
Login shell: /bin/bash
Home folder: /home/user
It's a member of the groups: audio, games, users, wheel.

When I plug the drive into a USB port and turn it on, KDE Media Manager detects it adds this line to fstab:

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/dev/sda1               /media/External_Disk   ntfs    user,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

and that folder is created.
When I remove the drive ("safely remove"), the line is removed from fstab (and the folder is removed). I can't create it myself and leave it there, because it interferes with other external drives that have different filesystems.

If I look at the folder's permissions, it's owned by root, even though KDE Media Manager created it on my account. I can't chown the folder, because the drive is a "read-only filesystem" (ntfs).

If I try to open the folder in Konqueror, it gives me:

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You do not have enough permissions to read file:///media/External_Disk

How can I fix this so that I have permissions to view it, or so it mounts as being owned by my user account?

zdn3023 · Post by **zdn3023** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 11:05 pm

I am also seeking answers to a similar question: whether ntfs external drive can be written directly after it is mounted. So far I haven't found a solution.
I searched internet for suggestions, and found "captive", which is supposed to make a ntfs drive writable from gentoo. I wonder if this is the only solution.
Please clear my doubts if someone there has an answer.

ahd123 · Post by **ahd123** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 12:27 am

I'm not talking about writing to the drive. I'm more concerned with getting the correct permissions to just access it. I converted my Windows side to FAT32, and I'll do the same with my external drive if need be.

I had Captive-NTFS running nicely on my last Gentoo installation, and I think that's because I had it download the service pack in order to get the drivers. This time, it wasn't working correctly, and I believe that's because I had it use the drivers from my XP SP2 installation. Now the changes don't get written (they seem virtual), so I don't use it because it's not important enough to fight with.

GNUtoo · Post by **GNUtoo** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 1:39 am

usualy i do (for fat and ntfs drives,others worked fine)
mount /dev/hdxx /mnt/hdxx -o gid=100,umask=02
it work but i don't know what it means...
there are also others variantt of gid,uid and umask that work...
basicly it aply xome permissions to all the folder and files of the disk because fat and ntfs doesn't have unix permissions (mabe there is a way to do so but they have not theses permissions activated by default)

Monkeh · Post by **Monkeh** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 1:59 am

new_to_non_X86 wrote:it work but i don't know what it means...

If you don't know what it means, you really ought not to be using Linux. If you can't grasp proper permissions, Linux is not the OS for you (and you're likely to cause it plenty of problems).

GNUtoo · Post by **GNUtoo** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 8:23 am

that's not so important on an external fat32 disk
that doesn't compromise my security...
and if there is a simple explanation i'd be hapy to know it
because mabe gid and uid are usefull somewhere else ...NFS for example can use them...but i've no need to (i use a simplier thing..with only ip in /etc/exports)
and i like to learn things...but i didn't find some explaination and haven't look futhurer...(it was in my todo list...)
and i don't know a better os than gentoo(mabe open-solaris? but i've not tryed)

Gentree · Post by **Gentree** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 12:10 am

man before post

man mount
man fstab
man sudo
man groups
man chown
man chmod

In general only root can mount and the caller of mount becomes the owner. If you mount it as root you may not be able access it as a lower user. Mount it as user through kde??

Since you dont actually tell us what the permissions are I'm not going to try and guess.

If you've decided to let KDE run your life you'd best go with the flow unless you understand what you're doing else you are likely to get in a knot.

your other post shows "user" in fstab , here you say "users" , not the same , which is it , man mount

what do you think wheel does ? search forum; man sudo.

Try posting some info that will enable others to help. Like output of
ls -ail /media/*
mount
df -h

ahd123 · Post by **ahd123** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 12:12 pm

Gentree wrote: your other post shows "user" in fstab , here you say "users" , not the same , which is it , man mount

I only posted the last line of my fstab in this thread. It's the same line in the other thread. KdeMediaManager adds that line for the external drive. Everything else was done by me.

Gentree wrote: Try posting some info that will enable others to help. Like output of
ls -ail /media/*
mount
df -h

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localhost ~ # ls -ail /media/*
total 4339148
     5 dr-x------  1 root root      28672 Feb  4 04:06 .
607228 drwxrwxrwx  3 root root         80 Feb 11 06:56 ..
  3589 dr-x------  1 root root          0 Dec  3 19:14 Backup
    33 dr-x------  1 root root      28672 Sep 24 00:24 Documents
   376 dr-x------  1 root root       8192 Mar 13  2005 Game Save
   599 dr-x------  1 root root       4096 May 13  2005 Misc
   903 dr-x------  1 root root      28672 Dec 23 02:00 My Music
  1915 dr-x------  1 root root      45056 Dec  4 22:32 My Pictures
  2346 dr-x------  1 root root      20480 Sep  9 22:42 My Videos
  2431 dr-x------  1 root root       4096 Jul 13  2005 Programming
  3388 dr-x------  1 root root      65536 Nov 18 05:00 Programs
  5355 dr-x------  1 root root       4096 Dec 25 14:08 RECYCLER
  4160 dr-x------  1 root root       8192 Oct 25 23:25 Settings
  5353 dr-x------  1 root root       8192 Jan 22 21:13 System Volume Information
  4979 dr-x------  1 root root      28672 Dec  9 19:57 UO
  6128 dr-x------  1 root root      12288 Dec  4 19:38 Website

When KDE mounts the drive, it automatically creates /media/External_Disk and the fstab entry with the "user" flag. I don't know why it would create the folder as owned by root.
It's a read-only drive (ntfs, and captive-ntfs wasn't writing files correctly, so I don't use it), so I can't change the permissions on the files contained.

I just realized something. When I finished the installation and configuration of Gentoo using root, I copied /root/ to /home/user/ (and chowned it to "user") so I could keep all my KDE configuration and such. The only program I found to have a problem with this was Firefox (it had files with paths that made it think I was still using the root account), and I corrected the files. Could certain elements of KDE possibly think I'm still root, even though my home folder is correct for my current user, and I don't have root permissions?

ahd123 · Post by **ahd123** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 12:35 pm

ahd123 wrote:I just realized something. When I finished the installation and configuration of Gentoo using root, I copied /root/ to /home/user/ (and chowned it to "user") so I could keep all my KDE configuration and such. The only program I found to have a problem with this was Firefox (it had files with paths that made it think I was still using the root account), and I corrected the files. Could certain elements of KDE possibly think I'm still root, even though my home folder is correct for my current user, and I don't have root permissions?

I'm pretty sure this is the cause of the problem. There are a lot of paths in config files that point to /root as my home directory. I'm surprised I'm not having more problems.
I'm going to go through them all and fix them.

Edit: Why didn't they just use the $HOME environment variable?

ahd123 · Post by **ahd123** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 3:06 pm

I fixed all the files, but I still have the same problem.

I even tried making another user with the same permissions, but I get the same problem.