Question

3

Root Owns Home Directory, chown does not work

rated 0 times [ 3] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 31617 / 2 Years ago, thu, june 2, 2022, 3:08:53

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 and having various problems. I have traced it back to the fact that my user's home directory (/home/user) is owned by root.

The /home directory is actually mounted on another drive, but I can see that in fstab I am mounting only /home and not /home/user:

UUID=DC56D19E56DX3233 /home ntfs user,exec 0 2

The chown command below does not seem to work:

sudo chown -R user /home/user

This will run without errors, however it does not actually change ownership of the direcory. Here is the output of ls -ld after running the command:

drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20480 Sep 25 00:07 /home/user

This is the same as it was previously.

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3 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago ntlesslving · Accepted Answer

The issue, as mentioned in the comments, was that my home directory was mounted on a different hard drive with an NTFS filesystem.

I backed up my home directory with Deja Dup to an external drive. Then used gparted to format the internal NTFS drive and change the filesystem to EXT4.

Next I changed /etc/fstab to match the new UUID of the drive and changed "ntfs" to "ext4".

After restart, I had to press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to login in a terminal. I was there able to use sudo chown -R user:user /home/user.

I was then able to login to the GUI, and restore my home directory using Deja Dup and the backup on my external drive.

So far, everything is working great.