How do I set read/write permissions my hard drives?
I’ve recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 on my laptop, but I can’t do anything with my 1.5TB external drive, and my 500GB because I don’t have write permission. Are there any specific commands I can use in the terminal to set the read/write permissions? The external is NTFS, and the 500GB is ext4.
12 Answers 12
for your 500 GB hard-drive (ext4) filesystem, you need to give the write and execute permission on /media/username/your_drive partition:-
sudo chmod ugo+wx /media/username/your_drive Brief Explanation:—
sudo :- it will elevate your priviledges to execute the command.
chmod:- command to change the permissions
/media/username/your_drive :- partition
For your NTFS partition please follow fossfreedom’s advice.
@loretoparisi try sudo chmod ugo+rwx /media/username/your_drive the r in the flags tells the computer to allow you to read as well as write and execute.
If you don’t mind the security problems you can do a recursive chmod in order to change the permissions of all the files.
cd /media/your_external_drive sudo chmod -R -v 777 * Also if your files were created in another OS like windows they will have different ownership you can do the same as above to change the ownership of the files
cd /media/your_external_drive sudo chown -R -v your_username:your_username * Thats the way I solved a similar problem for my friend after migrating from windows and also after migrating from Linux Mint to Ubuntu.
To only give yourself permission for the drive, but not for all of its contents, use: sudo chown -v your_username:your_username /media/your_external_drive
Please don’t recommend 0777 a.k.a. “please-hack-my-system-and-destroy-my-data” permissions for no apparent reason! There’s almost never a reason to do that because it can be avoided with more sensible modifications like changing (group) ownership. −1
To fix read/write issue ntfs, just install these packages:
sudo apt-get install ntfs-config ntfs-3g when installed, in the dash, type in and run: ntfs-config enter your password when prompted, and then you can enjoy read/write support for ntfs file systems.
Don’t mark all your files as executable as some answers suggest. Use 755 for directories and 644 for files. This will set the x bit for directories in order to list their contents but not for files.
find /path/to/drive \( -type d -exec chmod 0755 -- <> + \) -o \( -type f -exec chmod 0644 -- <> + \) @DavidFoerster Hi, thanks for the edit. This seems like a rather big change. Maybe it should be another answer instead?
Tell you what: I’ll meet you in the middle and change the find command so that it does exactly the same as your two find command but with only one pass through all directories.
I formatted my extended partition using GParted and the resulted drive had only root level access. In order to grant access to my username, I executed below command.
sudo chown -v username:username /media/username/disk-name I had the same problem and solved it with nautilus as root.
if nautilus is not installed:
sudo apt-get install nautilus Before running nautilus make sure the partition or hard disk is mounted.
Run nautilus as root with
Your partition or hard disk should appear on the left.
Right click on it -> select «Properties»
In the new window that appears, select the «Permissions» tab. From here you can change the owner if you need to, as well as the permission for a certain user, root, or others.
Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! I recommend to edit this answer to expand it with specific details about how to do this. (See also How do I write a good answer? for general advice about what sorts of answers are considered most valuable on Ask Ubuntu.)
I just keep getting Error setting permissions: Read only file system. if I try to change the permissions in Nautlius properties.
I was having a hard time solving the problem and this solution worked for me
- install physical storage device manger:
sudo apt-get install pysdm Note: if you can’t change files to binary executables, go to special files and check permit execution of files as binaries, and go to step 7
i installed pysdm before. Today, after a year or so i am trying to install pysdm again. I am getting Unable to locate package pysdm
Using Terminal (Use this when you are currently logged in Ubuntu):
- Quickly open the terminal or press Ctrl Alt T
- First you need to find out the partition’s name which you want to access, run the following command:
mount -t ntfs-3g -o rw /dev/sda1 /media/
Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! This looks like a copy-paste of this web page. When providing answers, please provide them in your own words. Also, please provide attribution to the sources you used.
I look around the forum for answers.
I have 3 users, «user1″ ,»user2», «user3»:
- user1 : is sudo user with most of the access
- user2 : is also sudo user with less access
- user3 : is just another user with no sudo access
Im trying to give access to partitions 1 and 2 to user1, user2 and user3 . The owner of the partition is root. the partitions are mounted at
Note : I tried to mount the partition using
sudo mkdir /media/IntHDD170 sudo mkdir /media/IntHDD171 Which created the directory to mount the partitions.
- Used nautilus as root.
- if nautilus is not installed: sudo apt-get install nautilus
- Before running nautilus make sure the partition or hard disk is mounted.
- Run nautilus as root with
From here you can change the owner if you need to, as well as the permission for a certain user, root, or others.
Note: The user1 ,user2 and user3 did not get access to the partitions yet
Step 2: Added User2 and user3 to group «user1».
usermod -aG user1 user2 usermod -aG user1 user3 chmod -R 777 /media/user2/1 chmod -R 777 /media/user2/2 LABEL=/dev/sda3 /media/$USER/1 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0 LABEL=/dev/sda4 /media/$USER/2 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0 And access partition 1 from user2.
I don’t know if this is the right way to do it. Just combined many responses and did. Somehow its working.
I had this problem in a dual boot (Mint + W10) when windows didn’t close down properly. I tried all the combinations to get rw permissions. Finally,
Going back to windows and turning off the pc did the job. Rights where restored! The fstab entries are written using ntfs-config.
If you are dualbooting windows and Ubuntu then there is an issue of improper dismount of hard-disks by windows. I observed this when I shut down from windows and switch to Ubuntu, I lose my write access to the disks even though I have Read and Write enabled. So, either you can turn off a feature of fast booting windows in the Power Options of Windows or you can Hibernate the windows and then switch to Ubuntu. This solved it for me. 🙂
These posts were very helpful fixing an old HDD for backup. Don’t format on Windows, use Ubuntu GPARTED, Previously I had formatted an old external HDD on Windows 7 as FAT but Ubuntu 20.04 ‘backup’ said it had no permissions to write, ‘backup fails’. ROOT is the owner and ‘Disks’ would not let me change owners to ‘me’ or change permissions . Solution: The HD was auto mounted to /dev and using ‘Disks’ I changed the mounting folder to /media/myname and the permissions automatically changed to ‘Me’ and then Ubuntu ‘backup’ executed fine.
This actually took about 6 hours to study and resolve.
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How to make read-only file system writable?
At some point, the filesystem on my digital audio player has become read-only. I cannot copy files into it or remove files on it. Are there some possible reasons for the player’s file system to change permissions in this way? I tried using chmod :
$ sudo chmod a+rw SGTL\ MSCN/ chmod: changing permissions of `SGTL MSCN/': Read-only file system Could you also add brand of the player? 🙂 searching ‘SGTL MSN’ actually ONLY brings up this topic 😀 If you are really unlucky it’s the device that’s bugged: as a last(!) resort reset the player. But only when you do not get any good anwsers soon(ish) 🙂
Tried everything, and found a simple solution (heretic). Plug the usb to windows 8 or 7, click «repair external drive», go back to linux. Hope this helps someone.
7 Answers 7
If a filesystem has been mounted read-only, chmod will not work since it’s a write operation too.
Try remounting it read-write:
sudo mount -o remount,rw '/media/SGTL MSCN' If the device has a write lock on it (like SD memory cards), you need to turn it off. Hardware locks cannot be disabled by software. Note that the write lock on SD memory cards is located from the sight you see the letters near the up left corner and it looks like a very small switch.
Some filesystem drivers may also not support write operations, this is the case with the older NTFS module supported by Linux. For NTFS filesystems, be sure to use the ntfs-3g driver which should be picked automatically nowadays. If not, you can force the driver with something like:
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -o uid=$(id -u) /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ (where /dev/sdb1 has to be substituted for your block device and /mnt/ for your destination)
@XavierStuvw If read/write protected means readonly, ok. Otherwise you could try to wipe it and repurpose it. The wipefs command can be used on a partition to ensure that no filesystem is recognized. See man wipefs (part of util-linux).
@JoshuaSalazar how did you mount it? Perhaps you could create a new question and include such details, this comment section is getting a bit too large.
For NTFS file systems this problem may occur when it is not properly unmounted (probably by unexpected shutdown of windows). In such cases the file systems are marked as locked.
You can mount them properly using the following ntfsfix command, for example:
Please replace /dev/sda3 with your own device name.
I’d like to add for future Googlers that doing this fixed the «New Steam library folder must be on a filesystem mounted with execute permissions» on Manjaro Linux and it’s probably the same for other distros.
Thanks for this! I’m dual booting Kubuntu and Windows 10 and I could not understand why sometimes I’m unable to mount a disk with write permissions!
I had this problem occur on several USB sticks. Each time I searched for an answer and tried various suggestions, including using Terminal to run commands, reformatting on both Linux and Windows machines, etc. All to no avail.
It happened to me again today so again I went looking to see if I could find a solution. I tried the things here, but they didn’t work.
Out of desperation I again went to Disk Utility. I unmounted the drive and then hit «Format» on the partition portion, not the drive portion — USB only had the single partition. This time it WORKED. Then I went to the drive portion and again reformatted the single partition as a master boot drive and monkeyed a bit more with it.
The upshot is, I’m now able to read and write to the drive again.
I don’t know if I just got lucky this time or not. But it is working again.