I am trying to use my ext4 USB drive but Ubuntu 13 is currently mounting it with write permission only for root so with my normal user I can't write to it, without sudo.
The first place I checked was dconf-editor
which has the following options
- automount
- automount-open
- autorun-never
- autorun-x-content-ignore
- autorun-x-content-open-folder
- autorun-x-content-start-app
and it seems to me there should be an option in there to control if I can write to the mounted USB drive, but no.
I also made sure my user is in the relevant groups: fuse
and plugdev
I've searched most of the internet and can't find a solution to change the permissions given by the mount operation. There's literally nobody out there having this problem incredibly. A ton of people have issues because their drives mounts totally read-only, but not this way with only root write permission.
I can't see any way of controlling what happens. I looked at setting the mount options using gnome-disks
but drew a blank.
It's not in fstab
but it does appear in the mount
list or /etc/mtab:
/dev/sdb1 /media/adam/WDPassport2T ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks2 0 0
This is what appears in syslog if it helps:
kernel: [111522.196770] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 6
kernel: [111525.384020] usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci
kernel: [111525.565220] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=0820
kernel: [111525.565225] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=5
kernel: [111525.565227] usb 2-1: Product: My Passport 0820
kernel: [111525.565229] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Western Digital
kernel: [111525.565231] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 575832314141334A34383631
kernel: [111525.565729] usb-storage 2-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
kernel: [111525.566203] scsi9 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0
mtp-probe: checking bus 2, device 7: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1"
mtp-probe: bus: 2, device: 7 was not an MTP device
kernel: [111526.564697] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD My Passport 0820 1007 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
kernel: [111526.565063] scsi 9:0:0:1: Enclosure WD SES Device 1007 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
kernel: [111526.568096] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
kernel: [111526.568202] ses 9:0:0:1: Attached Enclosure device
kernel: [111526.568263] ses 9:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 13
kernel: [111531.263108] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] 3906963456 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
kernel: [111531.265100] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
kernel: [111531.265105] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 47 00 10 08
kernel: [111531.266473] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
kernel: [111531.266479] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
kernel: [111531.272224] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
kernel: [111531.272230] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
kernel: [111531.284885] sdb: sdb1
kernel: [111531.288219] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
kernel: [111531.288223] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
kernel: [111531.288227] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
kernel: [111531.751588] EXT4-fs (sdb1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
udisksd[3131]: Mounted /dev/sdb1 at /media/adam/WDPassport2T on behalf of uid 1000
Best Answer
A possible reason could be that you formatted/created the storage disk with a tool with root privilege and so the file-system created was owned by the root.
Let's have a look at the o/p of your
ls
commands:The file-system is owned by the root, as indicated by
ls -ld
for your mount WDPassport2T and the permission stringdrwxr-xr-x
shows the owner root has the RW permissions while, the members of group root along with the world/others will only have R-permission.To solve you could change the permissions with
chmod
or just change the ownership recursively, and this is what I've shown below:which in your case would be:
Now if you need, you may also set the permissions with
chmod
:(which gives owner, group and the world RW permissions for all the files in the target.)
(which gives owner, group and the world RWX permissions for all the directories in the target.)
Reference:
Official Ubuntu Documentation: File Permissions