[Abandoned] Can't take ownership of exFAT HDD's

What other apps and distros do you use to round out your studio?

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jonetsu
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by jonetsu »

Of course it was a permission problem. It has shown several times in the output you pasted if I'm not mistaken.

One problem is when you swear you have run chown as root and it could not change the ownership. root can change ownerships.

GUI stuff are not for the lazy, they are for people who can waste time clicking on 7 popups (or more) to configure a network card. And who cannot have reproducible steps to configure a system clearly and cleanly written in a text file.

I never do backups as root. The lucky guys are right regarding this.

Ownership of the drives ? What drives to start with ? How do they look as they are now ? What are the ones that are backed up ?

df -h

ls -l /
merlyn
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by merlyn »

Jonetsu wrote:One problem is when you swear you have run chown as root and it could not change the ownership. root can change ownerships.
You should have a think about that.
jonetsu
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by jonetsu »

merlyn wrote:
Jonetsu wrote:One problem is when you swear you have run chown as root and it could not change the ownership. root can change ownerships.
You should have a think about that.
Not sure what you mean. The basic principle is that root can change the ownerships. That's the principle. If it can't then there's a (serious) problem. Mind you here Windows filesystems are at use in this case and I do not know precisely how these fs behave since I do not use them.
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by Death »

merlyn wrote:I don't see an exfat drive in /proc/mounts

What do we know?

(1) It used to work.
(2) The dastardly Photorec came along, changed the mount options and now it doesn't work.

Solution : reset the application that auto-mounts usb drives to its defaults, which hopefully is how it was before Photorec.
Yeh haha :P

Ok. I'll try that command again to find out what auto-mounts the drives so I can try and reset it. I don't know what to look for in that insanely long output from the terminal though. But I'll try figure it out...
jonetsu wrote:Of course it was a permission problem. It has shown several times in the output you pasted if I'm not mistaken.

One problem is when you swear you have run chown as root and it could not change the ownership. root can change ownerships.

GUI stuff are not for the lazy, they are for people who can waste time clicking on 7 popups (or more) to configure a network card. And who cannot have reproducible steps to configure a system clearly and cleanly written in a text file.

I never do backups as root. The lucky guys are right regarding this.

Ownership of the drives ? What drives to start with ? How do they look as they are now ? What are the ones that are backed up ?

df -h

ls -l /
I disagree. Using the GUI is always easier when you don't already know the commands. You might've forgotten if you've been doing this stuff for a while, but it's a bit of a headache to learn for most folk. My life would be better if I never had to mess with a terminal again. I don't enjoy it and would rather just GUI my way through everything like I did on Windows. I don't care about being an expert Linux user or anything. I'm just here because I don't want to run a piece of spyware as an operating system. But it's cool, I've already learned that this is not the way of Linux and I do understand the benefits of knowing this stuff, so here I am, trying to learn it because I need to ;)

So, I have 4 drives. I currently have RW permission on them all, but ownership of only 2 drives.

1. Internal SSD (LVM) which has my Linux install. I believe root owns this drive - is that normal?
2. Internal HDD (ext4). My user account owns this drive.
3. External HDD (exFAT). Root owns this.
4. External HDD (exFAT). Root owns this.

I backup the Home folder from drive 1 to drive 2.
I backup drive 2 to drive 4.
I backup drive 3 to drive 4.

Does that answer the questions?

Cheers.
merlyn
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by merlyn »

Death wrote: I'll try that command again to find out what auto-mounts the drives so I can try and reset it.
None of the commands I've posted will help find out what software auto-mounts usb drives on your system.To find out about the software that auto-mounts usb drives on your system use google. There may be gui for it, or you may have to edit a configuration file.

On a more technical note: a uid is not the same as a uuid. A uid identifies a user. A uuid identifies a device: a hard drive.
Death
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by Death »

merlyn wrote:
Death wrote: I'll try that command again to find out what auto-mounts the drives so I can try and reset it.
None of the commands I've posted will help find out what software auto-mounts usb drives on your system.To find out about the software that auto-mounts usb drives on your system use google. There may be gui for it, or you may have to edit a configuration file.

On a more technical note: a uid is not the same as a uuid. A uid identifies a user. A uuid identifies a device: a hard drive.
I I was just searching for that actually. I think it's just the GUI, Cinnamon that's responsible, but I'll see what I can find..

Yeh I may have said UID before, but I would've meant to say UUID when talking about these storage drives.
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by milo »

Death wrote:Yeh dude haha.. I've had various goes at Linux as my main OS over the past 10 years or something and always went back to Windows because I just wanted to use my computer instead of spending so much time troubleshooting and pissing around with the terminal ;( I've just come back to Linux as my main and only operating system this year. So I've only been back a matter of months now and have had to re-learn basically from scratch. It's gone much better this time than my previous attempts though. But HDD stuff always seems to cause me the most trouble. It's crazy how hard it is just to setup some bloody hard drives sometimes...

I think the fstab has already been modified by the GUI in Mint when I set stuff up. But I should probably take a look at it and learn what to do with it. I remember messing around in there in my previous install. I wish I could just be lazy and do everything by the GUI, but Linux keeps showing me that it's not good enough to think like that. YOU MUST BECOME A TERMINAL MASTER! :lol:
It's true. You have to embrace the terminal and get comfortable with editing text config files in order to really feel comfortable with Linux. I never try to convert my non-geek friends to Linux for this reason.

My experience parallels yours, only a decade sooner. I slowly and haltingly switched over from Windows between 2000 and 2007, and even after I had switched to Linux full time I still kept a Windows box around for a few things here and there. These days all I use Windows for is putting songs on an old iPod every few months for my daughter.

So what was the killer app that kept me coming back to Linux in the early 2000's? It was Gnucash! I never found a better free alternative on Windows, so I always kept a Linux partition on my machine just to do my accounting, and one by one eventually I migrated all of my other computing tasks over. I can't imagine going back, although I have had a couple of Linux friends who gave up and went back to Windows. (One was a Gentoo user, for crying out loud!)
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by Death »

@milo - Yeh it's been a gradual journey to get here. Definitely took me a few goes over the years! Mint is quite easy these days and it has a really cool backup utility called Timeshift (Kinda like System Restore on Windows). This utility alone made all the difference this time round. I used to reinstall Linux from scratch when I booted into a black screen because I had no idea what to do to fix it & just got overwhelmed trying to learn what to do. This got tiresome pretty quickly. But now, I can sometimes just fix this kind of issue with some simple terminal stuff, but otherwise, Timeshift is there :)

I hear ya though. I think I'm actually sticking this time. This is my longest run yet.. I'm not dual booting Windows like previous times either. I just have a VM which I basically never use. Trying to actually become a Linux user this time rather than a Windows user on Linux. But, it's still a challenge when it comes to the terminal. I'm getting used to it but I'd rather not do it still..

I guess Gentoo drove them insane? I've never used it but it sounds really advanced building up your own OS or whatever you do with it. I looked into Arch Linux the other day and ran away when I read something like "It's aimed at DIY users". I'll just stick with my Ubuntu based distro thanks :mrgreen:
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by jonetsu »

Death wrote:
jonetsu wrote:
df -h

ls -l /
I disagree. Using the GUI is always easier when you don't already know the commands.
Hence, learning. It's really not that complicated.
Death wrote:You might've forgotten if you've been doing this stuff for a while, but it's a bit of a headache to learn for most folk.
It might be even more than a headache. I played some sounds to the son of a real estate guy who is doing some DJ stuff. Using Bitwig. All good. Then I had to open a console to do something. He (almost) freaked out. So I'd say it's a bit deeper than a headache. Might be chronic. :)
Death wrote:My life would be better if I never had to mess with a terminal again.
Is that photorec a GUI or terminal application ?
Death wrote:So, I have 4 drives. I currently have RW permission on them all, but ownership of only 2 drives.

1. Internal SSD (LVM) which has my Linux install. I believe root owns this drive - is that normal?
2. Internal HDD (ext4). My user account owns this drive.
3. External HDD (exFAT). Root owns this.
4. External HDD (exFAT). Root owns this.

I backup the Home folder from drive 1 to drive 2.
I backup drive 2 to drive 4.
I backup drive 3 to drive 4.
OK, and at what point has the error happened when running lucky as non-root ?
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by merlyn »

A better title for this thread is 'Changing ownership of a mounted exfat filesystem'.

chown doesn't work on a mounted exfat or fat filesystem.

To change ownership of a mounted exfat filesystem, first unmount it. Then mount it with the appropriate uid.
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by jonetsu »

jonetsu wrote:
(as root) chown joe.joe /mnt/disk

Then mount the drive still as root:

mount /dev/sde1

Then open another console and as regular user:

cd /mnt/disk
touch test
Do I have to apply a bold font ?

"Then mount the drive still as root:"

Merriam-Webster anyone ? 8)
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by merlyn »

I think you should try this before you post suggestions.
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by jonetsu »

merlyn wrote:I think you should try this before you post suggestions.
Works 100%.

Maybe you have a misunderstaning with the word "then".

"[Series of actions] ... Then mount the drive still as root"

How can you mount at that point if it's already mounted ?

Again, Merriam-Webster ?
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by merlyn »

Did you try it on a fat filesystem?
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Re: Can't take ownership of HDD's as root

Post by jonetsu »

In which case the subsequent test using 'touch' would have failed.
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