Need detailed clear instructions in English how to get ownership of my partitions back

Question

I posted this on another forum, and days later I got two one sentence answers written in gobbledygook. I've no idea what they are talking about OR what it specifically is they want me to do - or, more to the point, how to do it.

Every time I boot my Ubuntu computer with the other Windows 10 drive, I lose ownership of my mail and data partitions, which are on a separate drive. Eventually the problem mysteriously fixes itself. In the meantime, noone has ever told me specifically what causes it or how to actually fix it. Discussions of this problem online are ALWAYS incomplete and written in Greek, and while sometimes the problem got solved, and sometimes it didn't, the procedure to fix it is never clear.

So, here is what ls -l originally gave me - an example of what it showed me for every directory and every file.

This is an example of what ls -l gives me:

drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 May 11 2019 'Typing Instructor Platinum'
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 445 Mar 21 2014 usmt32.bat

I tried running chown in root, and it changed group ownership but not user ownership. I tried it more than one way.

sudo chown -R dora /mnt/966A029F6A027C6D

did nothing; do I have to do

sudo chown -R dora:dora /mnt/966A029F6A027C6D?

I did sudo -i to change to root, then ran

chown -R dora:dora /mnt/966A029F6A027C6D

, and now ls -l gives me

drwxrwxrwx 1 root dora 8192 May 11 2019 'Word Press themes'
-rwxrwxrwx 2 root dora 86770592 Mar 28 2014 WSUS30-KB972455-x64.exe

Here is the relevant information on the two partitions, which are on their own drive, and the contents of my fstab file.

I need someone to tell me EXACTLY what changes to make in my fstab file, no generalizations written in Greek. I realize the file itself is written in Greek - but just specify what pieces of Greek that you write for me to do exactly what with.

Thanks for your CLEAR AND SPECIFIC help!

I'm sorry about the weird formatting of the contents of my fstab file, I didn't do the huge lettering and bolding, the page did, and I don't see a way to fix it. I tried. No option to fix it that works.

From Disks:
Mail Partition 1 /dev/sdb1 NTFS - Mounted at /mnt/32DE2C25DE2BDFB9 UUID 32DE2C25DE2BDFB9
Data Partiton 2 /dev/sdb2 NTFS - Mounted at /mnt/32DE2C25DE2BDFB9 UUID 966A029F6A027C6D
from blkid:
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="Mail" UUID="32DE2C25DE2BDFB9" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="0008089f-01"
/dev/sdb2: LABEL="Data" UUID="966A029F6A027C6D" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="0008089f-02"

Contents of fstab file: (Please note that the Windows drive is not currently even in the computer.)

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=24029b02-231a-45b8-b4c5-7154e6bb0a53 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=6b7317f0-2b52-493a-bbc7-fa266e1ee64b /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=2a7565aa-6abb-4db2-b713-acaf51624021 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/disk/by-label/Windows7VM /mnt/Windows7VM auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/32DE2C25DE2BDFB9 /mnt/32DE2C25DE2BDFB9 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
LABEL=Win7P32 /media/dora/Win7P32 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/7BC3312A37E89C0F /mnt/7BC3312A37E89C0F auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/966A029F6A027C6D /mnt/966A029F6A027C6D auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0

Yours, Dora Smith

There's a fairly clear explanation in this answer How to mount a NTFS partition in /etc/fstab? — steeldriver, Jan 28 '24 at 15:32
Despite the explanation in that question, I assume this question is asking for an ELI5 of it. The asker specifically does not want to see any technical words. Btw, @DoraSmith, please choose an answer to this question and accept it, and also go back your other question in 2015, and considering accepting the answer. — Daniel T, Jan 28 '24 at 15:37
Does this answer your question? How to mount a NTFS partition in /etc/fstab? — zwets, Jan 28 '24 at 19:05
Noone ever answered the same question when I've asked it previously, atleast, not in English, so rereading them will not help. I have no idea what an ELI5 is. — Dora Smith, Jan 28 '24 at 20:18
@DoraSmith ELI5 = Explain in simple English. See https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/ — Daniel T, Jan 28 '24 at 21:41
-1 for unnecessary drama and exaggerations. You could have used all that text for something useful, like explaining what it is that you had trouble understanding. — muru, Jan 30 '24 at 11:43

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 28 '24 at 15:22

Simply paste this back into your /etc/fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=24029b02-231a-45b8-b4c5-7154e6bb0a53 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=6b7317f0-2b52-493a-bbc7-fa266e1ee64b /home ext4 defaults 0 2
# swap was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=2a7565aa-6abb-4db2-b713-acaf51624021 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/disk/by-label/Windows7VM /mnt/Windows7VM auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/32DE2C25DE2BDFB9 /mnt/32DE2C25DE2BDFB9 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
LABEL=Win7P32 /media/dora/Win7P32 auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/7BC3312A37E89C0F /mnt/7BC3312A37E89C0F auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/966A029F6A027C6D /mnt/966A029F6A027C6D auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

Here is a less technical explanation instead of the usual one:

I just added ,uid=1000,gid=1000 to all your partitions that came from Windows. I assume you only made 1 user account, so its user id and group id should be 1000 by default. Windows and Linux partitions are different, so Linux annoyingly doesn't remember what you did in its last life where you taught it chown. Therefore, we put the ,uid=1000,gid=1000 in /etc/fstab to help it remember what to do with the Windows world.

vanadium · Answer 2 · 2024-01-30T11:32:25.017

Your partitions are formatted in NTFS, the proprietary file system of Microsoft. NTFS does not support linux permissions. Thus, you have to set the permissions for the entire partition. When mounting with /etc/fstab, you do this using the options uid and gid to set user and group, and dmask and fmask to set the permissions for directories and folders, respectively. Thus, you would add these options to the line in /etc/fstab for the partition as in the following example:

/dev/disk/by-uuid/966A029F6A027C6D /mnt/966A029F6A027C6D auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=027,fmask=137 0 0

This sets the user with uid 1000 and the group with gid 1000 as owner and group. You can learn the uid and gid of your current user from the output of the command id in the terminal. To see these properties for a different user, add the login of that user as argument, for example: id otheruser. With 027, permissions for directories are set to rwxr-x--- for directories, and with 137 to rw-r-----.

@Levente Indeed, I corrected this, thanks. – vanadium Jan 30 '24 at 11:33 — vanadium, Jan 30 '24 at 11:33

Need detailed clear instructions in English how to get ownership of my partitions back

2 Answers2