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Nickolai Leschov
Asked: 2015-11-29 13:46:17 +0800 CST

Permission denied when writing a file to new filesystem

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Upon installation, I have created an extra partition and mounted it as /data. The partition is visible, but I get a Permission denied error when trying to create a file or directory in it. Doing it with sudo does work.

I am using ext4 filesystem. Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64.

I have tried deleting the partition, then creating it again and setting up fstab to use a new partition. That changed nothing.

How do I make the extra partition behave normally, e.g. be writable by users?

partitioning

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For new ext4 etc filesystem, you need to change the permissions so your user can access it and read/write to it - using for example:

    sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /data

    Where /data is the path to where the drive is mounted - if you do this in the wrong place it will likely break things.
    $USER is replaced with the user's username by the shell.

    For more info read the chown manual page [ 1] [2]:

    man chown

    And to view permissions on stuff you can use ls -ld /data for a directory, and ls -l /data for the files in it.

    For some other filesystems - e.g. NTFS, you can specify the permissions via the mount options - see here.

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