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 Set Write Permission On ext4 Partition In Ubuntu Linux
When I last installed Ubuntu, I made an ext4 partition of around 80 Gb in notebook’s HDD.
The problem arouse when I tried to copy something on this partition. I was simply not able to copy anything in it or create a new file.
Apparently, I did not have ‘write permission’ on the said partition.
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to set write permission on ext4 partition in Ubuntu, in the correct way. Let’ssee how to do it.
How to set write permission on ext4 partition in Ubuntu:
The tutorial is performed in Ubuntu and uses extensively command line. A little knowledge about file ownership in Linux system would be a plus. Even if you do not know, no worries. You can still follow the tutorial with ease. Just follow the steps below:
Step 1:
First this, you need to know the UUID of the ext4 partition. But before that it will be better to know the name of partition.
The name, in Ubuntu, would be like sdaX or something. To find that, use the following command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
Output of the command will look like this:
You can find the name of the partition from its size, given under the Blocks field (in bytes). So in the picture above 78123008 roughly amounts to 78 Gb and thus it tells me that the partition name is sda7.
Now when you have the name, you can find the UUID by using the following command:
Output of the command looks like this:
As you can see, with the partition name, you can easily identify the UUID.
Step 2:
Once you have the UUID, the next step is to find out where is the partition mounted.
Usually the location of the ext4 mount is /media/ . Where user_name is your own username.
You can also use $USER variable. It automatically takes your username.
You can display the mounted partitions in the following manner:
The output of the command for me was this:
Now you see why I took the trouble of finding the UUID. If you have several partition mounted, you need to distinguish between them.
You can also see that only root has write on the mounted ext4 partition. You need to change the write permission for this partition here.
Step 3:
Now the easiest option is to give the write access to everyone using the infamous chmod 777.
But again, you won’t want to do that as it will give write access to anyone. Avoid using chmod 777 as far as it is possible.
Now, if not chmod 777, then what else? The file has root as owner and root as the group. Even ‘admin’ comes under ‘other’ group here.
What you can do do here is to change the group ownership of the mounted drive to admin. The admin group is generally named adm. You can use the following command to change the group owner:
sudo chgrp adm /media/itsfoss/56d0c0ab-60a0-48bf-955d-bc2f283009b6Once you have changed the group, change the write permission for the group in the following manner:
sudo chmod g+w /media/itsfoss/56d0c0ab-60a0-48bf-955d-bc2f283009b6Voila! Now you can copy-paste and create new files in the ext4 partition without any hindrance. And with added security, non-admin users will not be able to do so.
This tutorial is similar to what you need to do in order to auto mount Windows partition in Ubuntu. Any questions or suggestions are always welcomed. 🙂