Question

3

New partition: only root has rw rights

rated 0 times [ 3] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 14744 / 2 Years ago, sun, october 2, 2022, 6:15:30

I have set up 16.04 manually and have now two partitions (ext4). My second (and bigger) partition can be written at only by root. Now when I hit sudo su in the terminal and input my password, I'm still forbidden access to the folder. I actually think I messed up the partition process... My goal was to have two partitions, one for Ubuntu and one for my data. But now everything is on the same (small) partition.

After sudo parted -l, I get:

Festplatte  /dev/sda:  500GB  

Sektorgröße (logisch/physisch): 512B/512B  

Partitionstabelle: msdos  

Disk-Flags:



Nummer  Anfang Ende    Größe   Typ       Dateisystem     Flags

1      1049kB  15,7GB  15,7GB  primary   ext4            boot

3      15,7GB  496GB   480GB   primary   ext4

2      496GB   500GB   4223MB  extended

5      496GB   500GB   4223MB  logical   linux-swap(v1)

3 is the one with the problem.

From mount | grep 'media/johanna/home', I get:

/dev/sda3 on /media/johanna/home type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,data=ordered,uhelper=udisks2)

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ionash

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4 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago heathree · Accepted Answer

First create a mount-point:

sudo mkdir /media/data

Change the ownership of the mount-point:

sudo chown johanna: /media/data

Set the permissions:

sudo chmod 755 /media/data

Now open the fstab-file:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the following line at the end of the file:

/dev/sda3  /media/data  ext4 defaults  0  2

Press Ctrl+o and then hit Enter

Press Ctrl+x

Close the terminal and reboot. You will be able to write to your mounted partition now without root-privileges.

Note

On german keyboards the Ctrl-key should be the left Strg-key.

Explanation

It looks like you mounted the partition via the desktop-icon or opening the partition in the file-manager. Doing so will automatically create the directory /media/<username>/<partition-name>, the partition-name might be the label of the partition (if one exists) or the UUID of the partition.

This automatically created folder should be owned by and you should have read- and write-permissions, but mysteriously this doesn't seems to be the case. Also, this folder will be removed as soon as the partition is unmounted, if you don't unmount the partition yourself, the partition will be unmounted whenever the system shuts down. This explains that any changes (ownership, permissions) will not survive a reboot.

To ship around this we create a directory which we use as mount-point, adjust ownership and permissions of the directory and at last we add an entry to the fstab-file, so the partition will be auto-mounted at start-up. This directory is not going to be removed when the partition is unmounted.

Addition

I also have the impression that you wanted to set up your installation with a separate /home-partition. It seems you created the partition, but you didn't specify the mount-point (which would be /home) during installation. As the result you got a system with your system-partition and a big, but empty partition. Don't worry, you still can achieve this by copying the contents of the /home-folder to the partition and after doing so changing the mount-point of the partition to /home, here is a nice "How to do that":

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving