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00fruX
Asked: 2014-10-20 12:38:00 +0800 CST

New hard drive accessible to everyone

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OS: Ubuntu 14.04 desktop

The only way I've found out how to gain access to a second hard drive through nautilus is to re-install Ubuntu while the hard drive is in the computer. Then, when I go to look at the "500 GB Volume", I can actually go in and create folders and such.

After that, I added my linux cpu to a Windows domain and now when I try accessing the HD, I'm prompted for the old local users' password. I have tried many different suggestions found online about how to just set the security to world readable, but now I would like to just start over (without having to re-install Ubuntu).

In another attempt (re-install of Ubuntu), I deleted the original user that was created upon installation, so when I tried accessing the HD the second time it asked for the "root" password, of which, when I tried using the password of the deleted user, it didn't work of course. So, I set a root password but now I'm back to square one again. A 500 GB hard drive that I can't access.

Can someone explain how to format with ext4 and set permissions to world readable on a newly added internal hard drive?? I don't understand permissions too much and so I'm not sure where to set the permissions. On /dev/sdb1 or /media/user/LONG-UGLY-UUID-NAME.

chmod -R 777 /pathto...?

chown -R domainUID:domainGUI /pathto....?

Thanks!

permissions

1 Answers

  1. I recommend that you read about *nix modes since you will likely encounter them again and again.

    Changing access rights

    You can change a file or directory to be world (=everybody) readable with:

    chmod a+rX [PATH...]
    • a means to apply the change for all classes (owner, group, and world).
    • + means to grant additional access rights.
    • r means the right to read.
    • X means the right to execute (regular file) or traverse (directory), if at least one class already has execution/traversal access. It's important to use X (capital letter) instead of x because otherwise all files would be flagged executable, which is at best confusing and at worst a security problem.

    If you're not the file owner you need to acquire superuser privileges first by prepending sudo to that command. To change the permission of a directory tree recursively, add the -R switch as the first argument.

    Changing ownership

    If you want your main user account to own the file system root (e. g. because you want to use it for documents, multimedia or other non-system files), it would be more elegant to hand over the ownership to it:

    sudo chown [-R] "$USER:" [PATH...]

    This will change the ownership over [PATH...] to user $USER (which is usually the name of the user currently logged in) and the group ownership to the default login group of that user. Again -R applies the changes recursively.

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