External firewire harddisk rights

Asked by Rene

I can't get the writing rights for my ext. HD working. I hoped HAL device manager would help me, but I can't get it to change anything.
Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

thnx
Rene

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williamts99
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williamts99 (williamts99) said :
#1

Is your external HD formated using the NTFS file system?

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Rene (info-bahnhofzoo) said :
#2

It was formatted NTFS, but I reformatted it ext3.
The owner now seems to be root, but when I type:

sudo chown -R ikke.ikke /dev/sda1

nothing seems to happen...
Terminal doesn't even ask for a pass.

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Jeff Greene (jeffgreene) said :
#3

Hi, I think I have two answers for your problems.
1. If you recently sudo'ed, it won't ask you for your password again.
2. I think you are having a problem with how you are mounting it. Have you tried unmounting it and remounting it since you reformatted it? NTFS by default does not allow for write permissions, but a FAT32 or ext3 drive should. If this fails, there are ways in which you can manually mount it to have write permissions.

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Rene (info-bahnhofzoo) said :
#4

I unmounted several times, restarted and even added the following rule to fstab:

/dev/sda1 /media/extern umask=0222 0 0

but even after restart it mount as IEEEEsomething and stays owned by the root.

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Jeff Greene (jeffgreene) said :
#5

Try:
sudo umount /dev/sda1

Then replace that line you gave me with this:
/dev/sda1 /media/extern ext3 defaults 0 2

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Jeff Greene (jeffgreene) said :
#6

Afterwards you may need to do:
sudo chown -R ikke:ikke /dev/sda1

If all that does not work, right click on a file or folder in the drive and hit properties. Click the permissions tab and tell me what it says.

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Jeff Greene (jeffgreene) said :
#7

Sorry for sending so many messages, but I noticed a mistake. When I was copying what was from my fstab, I forgot to change the last "2" to a "0."

Use this one:
/dev/sda1 /media/extern ext3 defaults 0 0

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Rene (info-bahnhofzoo) said :
#8

Still mounts as IEEEEE and rights are root.

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Rene (info-bahnhofzoo) said :
#9

Still mounts as IEEEEE and rights are root.

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Rene (info-bahnhofzoo) said :
#10

After many trial and errors and lots of rebooting I managed to get it to work.

I had to put in the boot options manualy in fstab (wich was very difficult to find out because I'm a total newby to Linux)

/dev/sda1 /media/extern ext3 rw,auto,user 0 0

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Rene (info-bahnhofzoo) said :
#11

Thanks for your reactions

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Jeff Greene (jeffgreene) said :
#12

Hi, I reformatted my external hard drive which was FAT32 and working fine to ext3 and got the same problem that you did. I was able to fix it by adding this to the fstab:
/dev/sda1 /media/extern ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev,quiet,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=077 0 0

However, when I mounted it the second time without using fstab, the default settings were:
rw,nosuid,nodev

So you might not need all the extra stuff, you may want to try this first:
/dev/sda1 /media/extern ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0

I still had the problem after this, but after I used one of those lines, I was able to fix it completely by typing:
sudo chown -R ikke:ikke /media/extern

Come to think about it, I know why it didn't work in the first place...
You were typing sudo chown -R ikke:ikke /dev/sda1, only changing the permissions of the device itself, not the mounted folder. You probably don't even need to mess with the fstab, just change the permissions of the mounted folder.

I am almost positive one of these things will fix it. ;)
Hopefully you wont have any more troubles!

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Jeff Greene (jeffgreene) said :
#13

Haha, I didn't see that this was answered already, sorry!