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Re: Mounting and writing to second hard drive...

Subject: Re: Mounting and writing to second hard drive...
From: Unruh <unruh-spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:40:14 GMT
Newsgroups: uk.comp.os.linux

zed <zed@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>My apologies for the delay in replying - life got in the way of my
>interests.

>Ian Rawlings <news06@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> On 2008-07-26, zed <zed@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>> > I can mount (2) by going in to Computer and clicking on Mount but I
>> > cannot write to the drive.
>> 
>> What user are you trying to write to the drive as?  Chances are the
>> drive's directory will be mounted as root, so if you are not trying to log
>> in as root then you won't be able to write to it.  to fix this, run a
>> terminal and cd to the drive's directory, then use "sudo chown <your user>
>> ." and you should be able to write to it.  I don't know ubuntu though and
>> know it has some limits about root access, so running the command as root
>> might be slightly different but you get the idea.

>There is only one user - zed.

>The drive owner was /root as you suggested.  So I logged in as /root and
>then created three directories: Backups, Music, Pictures, as it is my
>intention as <zed> to use this drive to do Backups and keep my Music and
>Pictures on it.

>I then looked at Chown in the book "A Practical Guide to Linux - Commands,
>Editors, and Shell Programming" - most of which is beyond me :-( and typed
>the following into a terminal:

I am afraid you did not look very carefully. The syntax of chown is
chown username[.groupname] file1 [file2 ...]
where [..] indicates optional material and username is the login name of
the user you want to own the files.(zed in your case I believe)
YOu never told chown what username you wnated to change the files to.

Note that if the partition is a FAT partition, it knowns nothing about
usernames, and you cannot chown anything. 



>zed-desktop disk # chown /media/disk/zed
>chown: missing operand after `/media/disk/zed'
>Try `chown --help' for more information.
>zed-desktop disk # chown --recursive zed: /Backups/zed/
>chown: cannot access `/Backups/zed/': No such file or directory
>zed-desktop disk # cd /media/disk/Backups
>zed-desktop Backups # chown --recursive zed: /backups
>chown: cannot access `/backups': No such file or directory
>zed-desktop Backups # chown --recursive zed: /Backups
>chown: cannot access `/Backups': No such file or directory
>zed-desktop Backups # 

>Obviously I'm not understanding the correct sequence of commands.  So any
>help would be appreciated.
> 
>[snip]
>> 
>> > Questions>
>> >
>> > (a) What do I do to have the drive mount at boot?
>> 
>> Add it to your fstab, however if it's USB then it may well not get mounted
>> automatically as I know on my system, USB discs are not available until
>> after all the filesystems have mounted, so you will either have to run
>> mount -a as root, or add the mount commands to a script that runs well
>> after the system startup has happened.
>> 

>I'll leave this portion until I've changed the ownership :-)

>-- 
>zed

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