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On the command line I read root@luis-NH4CU53:~#, and my external HD is recognized, but I cannot make any changes to it because it's properties says root is the owner. You are not the owner, so you cannot change these permissions.

Luis Araujo
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  • The following can be useful: output of ls -al in that directory, Ubuntu version, how did you mount the external HDD (did it mount automatically or did you do it manually?) Please edit your question and include that information. Thanks! – Merlijn Sebrechts Mar 01 '15 at 17:01
  • add the outputs of sudo fdisk -l and sudo gedit /etc/fstab to your question please. – JoKeR Mar 01 '15 at 18:02

3 Answers3

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If you are going to use sudo with graphical applications, such as nautilus, than you really ought to use gksudo. I don't have enough rep to comment, but this is important because it is a security risk to run graphical programs with normal sudo, so thought I'd mention that. A better approach would be to open a terminal and navigate to the mountpoint, probably somewhere like /media/$user/device , and than run ls -l to figure out the permissions.

Regarding the original question, what kind of file system is the external drive formatted to? You can find out by running as root fdisk -l I have had this problem before with a VFAT partition. Even when logged in as root I could not write to the partition. Sometimes this can be caused by corruption on the disc or partition, it's very frustrating.

I am still looking for an answer to the VFAT no write access issue myself.

Chev_603
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Use the following command in terminal.

sudo nautilus

And enter your password.

This will open file manager with root permissions.

Now you may access your external hdd and make changes to it.

Note : Don't close terminal until you are finished making changes to hdd

Fabby
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Faizan Akram Dar
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    did you try it yourself? you won't change permissions this way.:) – JoKeR Mar 01 '15 at 18:38
  • Yes permissions wouldn't change but nautilus file manager will open with root permissions and thus changes can be made to devices, directories and files having only root access. – Faizan Akram Dar Mar 01 '15 at 18:41
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One thing to check: Make sure you're not viewing the folder through the admin:// protocol. It looks like this in the breadcrumbs of the Files app (nautilus):

breadcrumbs showing administrator root

If it shows "Administrator Root", press Ctrl+L and remove the text admin:// at the start of the address, leaving one slash (/media/...), and hit Enter.

It should now show "Computer" as the first item:

breadcrumbs showing computer as the root item

The admin protocol can cause permissions errors and warnings when accessing files and folders you normally have access to; I don't know what causes it to rear its head, but that's how you chop it off.

1j01
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