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This is my 2nd time around with an internal 4 TB drive or greater. And I seem to have continuous problems with permissions. I also had as problem with an external 6 TB drive and permissions. This has been happening on different computers. All were all running a Linux system. All drives were running an EXT4 system. I seems to have solved the problem with the external drive by formatting it as a NTFS files system.

However, on internal drives, I should be able to run them as a EXT4 files system. What happens is that I format them, then loose permissions to them after I re-boot. I can access them, but can not do anything else. I can not post files to them or create internal directories.

I've had the same problem with Ubuntu Gnome and Mint. What do I need to do, format them as NTFS drives?

I have tried the various 'chrown' and 'chmod' commands with various settings. No help. I get the message that permissions have been changed, then I access the drive. No change.

On one computer, my home directory was encrypted. On the other computer, it was not.

All hardware has been replaced and updated. New CPU. New motherboard. New power supply. New memory. Etc.

Tried: cd /media/lloyd/SyS_10

   sudo chmod -R -v 777 *

No help

Tried: cd /media/lloyd/SyS_10

   sudo chown -R -v lloyd:lloyd *

Again, no help.

Also tried some other things, which did not help. But can't remember the sequence.

Common points between them:

  1. Running a Linux system. Different flavors and different computers. (Ubuntu Gnome 17.10 and Mint 18.3.)

  2. Drives formatted as EXT4 (BIOS supports large drives.)

  3. Drives were equal or greater than 4 TB.

Common problems:

  1. Assigned all permissions to these drives to ROOT.

  2. All stated that I did not have ROOT Permissions.

It appears to me as if there is a bug in either Ubuntu or EXT4 when using multiple drives and those additional drives are larger than 2 TB. (I am leaning towards thinking that the bug is in EXT4 where the additional drives are larger than 2 TB.) This bug does not seem to affect the main drive. Sda1 or sda2 drive.

fossfreedom
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lloyd
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  • Please attach the output of sudo ls -l /media/lloyd/SyS_10 – dadexix86 Feb 03 '18 at 16:08
  • I have just found a solution. I don't know how this will work. But I just formatted this 2nd internal drive as a NTFS drive. I have now have full permissions to it. – lloyd Feb 03 '18 at 17:36
  • As I posted, I had reformatted the drive before I saw your message. But the result was, "Total 0". However, it is plainly showing in the media dir, even though it is now formatted as a NTFS drive. I have no idea why it is showing 0. – lloyd Feb 03 '18 at 17:45
  • The drive is empty. I have not put any files on it. I could not put any files on it when it was formatted as an EXT4 drive. When I reformatted it to a NTFS drive, I basically renamed it to Sy10. By going to my " /media/lloyd" dir, the "ls" command produces the drive. But as I said, the drive is empty. – lloyd Feb 03 '18 at 17:50
  • Sorry, I know exactly why it was showing "0", but I wasn't thinking at the time. The drive was empty. Anyway: Since I have run into this problem with multiple drives larger than 2 TB which are formatted as EXT4, both internal or external, and it has showed up using various Ubuntu variations and derivatives, and on more than 1 computer. I have satisfied myself there their is a bug in either the EXT4 file system or in Ubuntu on drives larger that 2 TB. My solution to using extra drives, when they are larger than 2 TB, is to always use NTFS formatted drives. This permission issue is a nightmare! – lloyd Feb 04 '18 at 13:30
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because the Ubuntu you mention is past EOL & no longer supported and thus off-topic.; Linux Mint is off-topic as it's not Ubuntu, nor an official flavor of Ubuntu thus off-topic. – guiverc Sep 13 '18 at 02:43
  • Possible duplicate of How do file permissions work? – Elder Geek Sep 13 '18 at 16:08

1 Answers1

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I finally am getting back to this post.

I was right about the problem being created by updates. It turned out that updates had changed the usage permissions on all USB devices, and were restricting usage. A timer seemed to be enacted for all permissions on all USB devices. Since I transfer large files between drives all of the time, this was a serious problem. I was exceeding the times allowed for file transfers between USB devices.

My solution was to change the permissions for all USB devices.

I have heard comments about me weakening the security on my system. But the fact is that my computer is not even usable without continuous access to USB devices.

Another fact is/was that those security updates cost me many files which were not replaceable.

Plus those security updates cost me one hard drive, which to overheated to the point where it fried itself and was no longer usable. It completely burned out while trying to unsuccessfully write large files which the permissions had timed out on and operating system was blocking.

I solved this problem many months ago by changing the permissions, but this is not a satisfactory solution for everyone. This problem is solved from my perspective. These days, I keep a close eye on all new updates which effect my USB drives.

lloyd
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  • Actually, I have found that this bug is caused, at least in some cases, by backup software changing the permissions to "ROOT Only" on everything in the root directory for ALL Read & Write operations. The media directory is changed so that only "ROOT can mount/un-mount extra drives. Also other directories that you normally have access to are suddenly restricted. This stops other programs from operating properly. And naturally this results in lots of problems. Changing permissions on the needed directories manually is the only solution. Places like 'media' and 'etc' come to mind. – lloyd Oct 07 '18 at 22:07