# Solved: External hard drive permissions



## absolutezero1287 (May 23, 2007)

Here's what happened:

I was messing around with my external hard drive. I used Gparted to add an ext3 partition so that I could boot another distro from it. After finding out that my BIOS didn't allow me to boot from the USB I deleted the ext3 partition, the swap, and the extended partitions, basically returning it to how it was before...or so I thought.

Later, I figured that I could partition my actual hard drive to boot another distro. So I decided to clear up some space by deleting my music and videos (which are all backed up in the external). Then I decided to clean out the external a bit by deleting files I deemed useless. And what happened was that I got a message saying that I didn't have permissions to write to it. I can't modify any of the files in my external in any way.

What I tried:
chown -R leonardo:users /media
I think that I was able to make myself the owner with this command but I still couldn't modify anything. The error message said that it was a read-only file system.

(Attached is a log with the output of the following commands:
fdisk-l
df -f
cat /etc/fstab


----------



## absolutezero1287 (May 23, 2007)

Update!
I used a windows box to change the settings of the external. It didn't work. I'm allowed to move things to the trash, but I can't completely delete the files. I'm still not allowed to write to it and somehow my music has become corrupted. This really sucks. 
Any help would be greatly appreciated!


----------



## absolutezero1287 (May 23, 2007)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4405927&posted=1#post4405927

I followed some advice from the above link and it didn't really help all that much. Using sudo chown doesn't work. It tells me that I can't change user permissions because the disk itself is read only. I imagine that deleting the partition won't help, plus I'll lose all my data.

I used a GParted LiveCD and was able to see my music files that were supposedly corrupted. Does anyone know how to recover my lost files? Gparted can find them why can't Ubuntu?

Any and all comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!


----------



## absolutezero1287 (May 23, 2007)

I now find that I'm able to copy things to my desktop from the external.
None of the methods have worked so I'm writing zeros to the hard drive. We'll see is it works.


----------

