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dearN
Asked: 2012-03-31 11:27:50 +0800 CST

Recurring changing owership problem on external HDD

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I've had this problem before and now it's struck me again and with full force!

Here are the details of my hard drive:

  • 1 TB, HFS+ type partition mounted at /dev/sdb2
  • Doesn't have write access for some reason (I tried copying files to it and it wouldn't take)
  • chown my-user-name /media/hdd-name/* didn't work
  • This was not required as journaling was already turned off.
  • This has never worked.

What gives? What should I do?

EDIT 1

In /media when I run ls -l, this is what shows up for attributes for my external hdd:

drwxrwxrwx 1 99 99 24 2012-02-24 12:42 Untitled 1

Where Untitled 1 is the (clever) name for my external hdd... Who is the "99" bloke? :P

Any thoughts?

SOLUTION!!!

Yippeee!!!

chown -Rf dnaneet:dnaneet /path/to/folder/

Please do leave any comments, thoughts/feedbacks pertinent to this solution...

I am reading this right now to get better informed about sharing data between OS's...

mount hard-drive 11.10 hfs+ read-only

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If your HDD is read-only, you will obviously not be able to chown your files. Afaik, hfs+ support isn't optimal (yet) under Linux. Have you installed all the necessary packages (I think you'll need hfsplus and/or hfsprogs)? Have you tried mounting it correctly?

    This post might (if you haven't checked it yet) help you with these steps: https://superuser.com/questions/84446/how-to-mount-a-hfs-partition-in-ubuntu-as-read-write

    Finally, you're talking about an external HDD: are you sure HFS+ is an appropriate choice for an xHDD? FAT32 is currently the most "universal" filesystem, and NTFS is starting to gain write support on most systems.

    Sure, FAT32 and NTFS suffer from serious external fragmentation, but i don't think you use your xHDD to run an operating system or heavy applications directly on it, do you? :-)

    Note that you need to chose between compatibility and functionality: both FAT32 and NTFS lack a proper ownership and permissions system, and FAT32 has a max. file size limit of 4GB on FAT32.

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