Ubuntu

can't get permission to write to add-on sata drive

Asked by ben_englund

I'm running ubuntu hardy 8.04 and I recently added another harddrive with multiple partitions. I got the partitions mounted but I can't seem to change the permissions. I've tried sudo chown, chgrp, etc. No help. I've tried nautilus as root and get to change the permissions, but when I close the permissions window the settings return. I've tried the sudo chmod 777 thing and still no luck accessing these partitions.

Now to make matters worse, I now do not have permission to write to a partition on my existing drive also. AND when I restart and log-in I get a message about $home /.dmrc file being ignored because it has wrong permissions. Here is my fstab file if that helps.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sdb1
UUID=11e01c8c-f027-49c9-be01-58eada037df5 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sdb6
UUID=c019765e-7cb6-42f8-9766-9b6252e55fb9 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
# /dev/sdb7
UUID=a3bb466f-fce3-4b24-aa4e-a82315061fcd none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sdb5 /media/sdb5 vfat users 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sdb6 /media/sdb6 ext3 errors=remount-ro,users 0 0
/dev/sdb7 /media/sdb7 swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/sdc2 /media/sdc2 swap sw 0 0
/dev/sdc3 /media/sdc3 vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ntfs defaults 0 0

Any help or ideas would be great
Thanks

Ben

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ben_englund (ben-englund) said : 		#1

I forgot to mention the drives I'm having trouble with are sdc1 sdc3 and now sdb5.

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George Standish (george-standish-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#2

Ben,

The three partitions you are having difficulty with are all of type VFAT, meaning Windows style partitions. Regular "unix" style permissions (chmod,chown) CAN NOT be applied to VFAT partitions, you need to "fake" these using special commands/fstab entires.

I don't personally use FAT or NTFS so have very limited experience in this regard.

See the documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountingWindowsPartitions

Best of luck,
George

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George Standish (george-standish-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#3

This might be of more "direct" assistance https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

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ben_englund (ben-englund) said : 		#4

Thanks I'll check that out. Any idea what I can do about the login error? Here is what it says

"User's $Home /.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default session and language from being saved. File should be owned by user and have 644 permissions. User's $Home directory must be owned by user and not writable by other users."

Thanks,
Ben

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George Standish (george-standish-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#5

Ben,

Your most recent post seems totally unrelated to the original question, meaning it should be a separate question.

In a terminal try:

   cd ~
   ls -l .dmrc

Is the file owned by your user? Do you have permissions over the file? As the error suggests, try running "chmod 644 .dmrc"

Best of luck,
George

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ben_englund (ben-englund) said : 		#6

When I try running "chmod 644 .dmrc" I get a message
"sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0466, should be 0440"
I'd like to figure this out but maybe I should just put karmic on new hard drive and move everything to that. I've put that one on my netbook and its not giving any trouble.

Ben

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ben_englund (ben-englund) said : 		#7

I installed Karmic on new hard drive and it isn't working. I think I'll open a new question about that. I'd still appreciate help this this one though.
Thanks

Ben

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George Standish (george-standish-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#8

Ben the error you are getting now appears to be with the file /etc/sudoers

  cd /etc
  sudo chmod 0440 sudoers

It is suspicious that this file's permissions where altered, do you recall perhaps changing sudoers file?

Hope it helps,
George

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ben_englund (ben-englund) said : 		#9

I have installed 9.10 and formatted the partition that had 8.04 on it. So this question is now dead. Thanks George for your help. Sorry I couldn't see it through.

Now with 9.10 I have some other MAJOR issues. I'll open new questions for those

Thanks again

Ben

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