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Accepted
Cam Jones
Asked: 2014-09-02 09:22:26 +0800 CST

How to access locked hard drive?

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I have a hard drive with an old 12.04 server install and a data partition on it. I have the hard drive hooked up to my current desktop using a usb to sata adapter with external power supply. I am on my 12.04 ubuntu OS install on my desktop. I am able to open the server install partition but whenever I try to access the data partition it says: This location could not be displayed, You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of “c436695a-0830-4e33-b6c6-61a54d801ab1". Is there a solution to this besides re-formatting?

Still having trouble so if anyone could be more specific that would be nice.

The output of lsblk is:

user1@user1-HP-Pavilion-dv6000-RG279UA-ABA:~$ lsblk
NAME                  MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                     8:0    0  74.5G  0 disk  
├─sda1                  8:1    0  19.5G  0 part  
├─sda2                  8:2    0     1K  0 part  
├─sda3                  8:3    0   9.8G  0 part  
├─sda5                  8:5    0   9.8G  0 part  /media/5058-F505
├─sda6                  8:6    0     2G  0 part  
├─sda7                  8:7    0    14G  0 part  
├─sda8                  8:8    0     2G  0 part  
│ └─cryptswap1 (dm-0) 252:0    0     2G  0 crypt [SWAP]
└─sda9                  8:9    0  15.9G  0 part  /
sdb                     8:16   0 149.1G  0 disk  
├─sdb1                  8:17   0  18.6G  0 part  /media/71d5ea0b-d815-4756-ba29-2391b13f8285
├─sdb2                  8:18   0     1K  0 part  
├─sdb5                  8:21   0 121.1G  0 part  /media/c436695a-0830-4e33-b6c6-61a54d801ab1
└─sdb6                  8:22   0   2.8G  0 part  
sr0                    11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

sdb5 is the partition I'm trying to access. I named it /mnt/owncloudData when setting it up on the server.

output of ls -la /media: 

total 24
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  root     4096 Sep 13 04:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root  root     4096 Aug  5 12:56 ..
drwx------  7 user1 user1    8192 Dec 31  1969 5058-F505
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  root     4096 Sep  2 02:01 71d5ea0b-d815-4756-ba29-2391b13f8285
drwxrwx---  4 root  www-data 4096 Nov 13  2013 c436695a-0830-4e33-b6c6-61a54d801ab1
hard-drive

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    From the output of lsblk, it turns out the partition is already mounted, in /media/c436695a-0830-4e33-b6c6-61a54d801ab1. The output of ls -la /media made clear why you did not have access to the partition; owner (root) and group (www-data) have full permissions (rwx) , others (like you) have no permission at all (---), that includes read access.

    What you can do is change the owner of the partition with the command: sudo chown -R user:user /partition (where user is your_username), and optionally change the permissions of the partition, at least to save your data. After that I would reformat the disk, repartition, give it an appropriate label etc, if you do not use it in your server anymore.

    • 3

  2. Assuming you have permission to use sudo on your desktop, then you have enough permissions to view anything connected to it.

    You also, of course, have authority to change the permissions on the disk, if you so desire. It depends on what you want to do. If you simply want to access the data, but not use the drive any more, you can mount the drive, then use sudo chown to make yourself the owner, and that will probably fix everything.

    This is all basic linux.

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