Extrenal Hard Disk and File System

[Fred Roller]

On Sat, 2009-08-29 at 17:05 -0500, MirJafar Ali wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have one very naive question. The computer science department of our
> college has limit
> of 10GB for the users and my requirements are higher, so I was
> planning to use external
> hard disk ( with USB ).
> 
> But it seems that when I use external hard disk, its permission are
> always for the root. (i.e)
> /medis/disk and it goes to read-only mode.  My question is what
> pertinent questions ( and the
> solution), I must ask to the system adm so that I can read-write into
> the hard disk and don't
> annoy them  for such a stupid question.
> 
> thanks
> 
> Mir

>From a similar problem I simply put the disk on a system I had root
access to and changed the permissions on the mount point.  Typically:

list the directory:

	ls -l /media/

which yields something like:

	drwx------ 10 froller root 4096 1969-12-31 19:00 disk

"/media/disk" being the mount point of the usb disk.
then change the permissions:

	sudo chmod 777 /media/disk

which would give you:

	drwxrwxrwx 10 froller root 4096 1969-12-31 19:00 disk

The permissions should carry from machine to machine.  This does open
the disk to malicious writes, so becareful.  The other option would be
for their admin to run the command:

	sudo chown [your user]:[your group] /media/disk

i.e.
	sudo chown froller:froller /media/disk

doing this on their system would give your user (the user you use on
their system) ownership of the disk and thus being able to write and
execute.  This last is assuming you are going linux to linux.  If you
are linux to windows then the first would be your best option.
-- 
Fred R.
www.fwrgallery.com

"Life is like Linux - simple; if you are fighting it, you are doing
something wrong."