Ubuntu – Changing owner of an external hard drive

hard drivepermissions

My understanding of code is about zero. I can open a terminal window, and type commands that are given to me, but that's about it.

I have an external hard drive with two partitions. I bought this drive when my operating system was Apple, 10.5 or so, and it was formatted as HFS+ with that system. Now, connecting the HDD to my Linux system, I can read files, but I have about 1.5 TB of space that I can't use, because I am not the owner of these files, so can't write to the HDD.

Short of reformatting the HDD, is there a way for me to set the permissions for the HDD so I can write to it?

Best Answer

Your root account will be able to set ownership of any file. Open a terminal and switch to root, with the command sudo -i.

Next, identify the path at which the partition is mounted (run mount command) and hopefully you can tell which partition is which in the output.

Then you can chown -R youruser:yourgroup /path/to/mounted/partition to change the ownership to your user and group.

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