Ubuntu – Insufficient permissions to access USB/Flash drive after UID change

external-hddmountpermissions

Since changing my uid I no longer have the permissions to see a USB hardrive/stick that is automatically mounted at /media/USERNAME.

Nautilus gives the message

Unable to open a folder for DRIVENAME

No application is registered as handling this file

If I log on as root in a terminal I can see that the drive is mounted in the proper location and can access the files.

Does someone know what I need to do to make it so that I can use the mounted drive with my non-root user?

With other users on the system everything works as expected.

I managed to solve this problem by unmounting all USB disks I had plugged in and deleting the /media/username directory.

Then, when I plug in my USB stick again, the directory gets re-created and all is good.

Since you have the UUID, you can edit /etc/fstab and add an entry like so:

UUID=<the UUID> /media/drivename vfat rw,nofail,umask=022,uid=<UID>,gid=<GID> 0 0

Replace <UID> and <GID> with the output of id -u and id -g respectively.

Explanation:

We need the UUID since the drive is a removable one, and we can't rely on /dev/sdXY as an identifier.
vfat is the mount type for FAT32 systems
The nofail option should prevent mount from complaining, or your boot from being held up, if the disk is not present.
The uid=<UID>,gid=<GID> options set the ownership of all files and folders in the mounted disk, since FAT32 doesn't have a Unix-like permission/ownership structure. This doesn't affect the files themselves, only the mounted representation. Ditto for the umask.