USB external disk write permission. What have I done wrong?

[Karl Larsen]

Zhengguo Xu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I formated a 160GB external usb disk as ext3 file system using GParted
> (logical instead of primary) and when it mounted automatically i don't have
> write permission. in disk property tab it says the disk's owner and its
> group are root. googled a bit and issued the following command:
>
> sudo chown zhengguo:zhengguo /media/disk
>
> yes i have write permission now. however, when i umount it, unpluged it and
> plugged it again, the disk could not mount automatically.
>
> what have I done wrong? How can i get the automatical mount function back
> and at the same time have write permission? (I am NOT talking about write a
> line in /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sdb1 or whatever because before i formated
> the disk, it can be auto-mounted without a such line in fstab)
>
> also, in GParted I couldn't find it anywhere to change disk label. Is it
> because of the GParted lacking of this function or just because i'm a newbie
> so...? I'd like this 160GB disk AUTOMATICALLY mounted when plugged in AND
> appear as "eBooks" (this is the disk label i'd like to use). Can it be done?
> How? google doesn't help much at this point. if i need to reformat the disk
> and it can only be done in command-line, can anyone kindly provide the
> command?
>
> thanks.
>
>   
    First chown will NOT work on /media/disk/. You need to use df to 
find out the right /dev/ to use. Then you can use chown on your external 
partition.

    Now you did chown /media/disk/ so look at that with ls -al and see 
what it is. On my Hardy it is:

karl at karl-hardy:~$ ls -al /media
total 16
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 4096 2008-09-14 12:40 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 2008-09-05 12:13 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 2008-08-19 13:52 boot
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  999    6 2008-06-14 11:16 cdrom -> cdrom0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  999 4096 2008-06-14 11:16 cdrom0
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    0 2008-09-14 12:40 .hal-mtab
-rw-------  1 root root    0 2008-09-02 15:04 .hal-mtab-lock
karl at karl-hardy:~$

In words both owner and group are root. If they are something else 
please change back to this.


    DF will print out the address for your external hard drive. Do NOT 
write anything in /etc/fstab.


Karl



-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.
   PGP 4208 4D6E 595F 22B9 FF1C  ECB6 4A3C 2C54 FE23 53A7