Setting permissions on an external USB hard drive so that all users can read from it?

Pi Man · 09-06-2004, 05:28 PM

Greetings. I'm new, both to the forums, and to Linux itself.

I'm having trouble getting an external USB drive working correctly. Any user can mount it, but I can't figure out how to make the contents accessible to any user. Chmod won't change the directory permissions, and I can't find anything in the man pages, info pages, or the SuSE help-center that partains to this problem.

If it's of any relavence, I'm on SuSE 8.2 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 9.1) and the external drive is actually an internal 40GB drive in a drive converter case, and the drive is formatted as NTFS.

I can read from it as the root user, but not as a normal user. I don't really have to be able to write to it, yet. I'm going to move all the data to my internal hard drive, reformat it, and put it all back after it's in ReiserFS.

Thanks for any help you guys can give me.
Pi Man.

P.S. Output of /sbin/lsusb

Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0680:0002 Realtek Semiconductor Corp., CPP Div. (Avance L ogic)
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0402:5621 ALi Corp.

PenguinPwrdBox · 09-07-2004, 12:30 AM

Alright - you have to edit /etc/fstab to allow your users to read/write the device. Here is what you do:

From a console:

Code:

pico /etc/fstab

You'll get a text file that looks something like this:

/dev/hda2  	/  	ext2  	defaults  	1 1
/dev/hdb1 	/home 	ext2 	defaults 	1 2
/dev/cdrom 	/media/cdrom 	auto 	ro,noauto,user,exec 	0 0
/dev/fd0 	/media/floppy 	auto 	rw,noauto,user,sync 	0 0
proc 	/proc 	proc 	defaults 	0 0
/dev/hda1 	swap 	swap 	pri=42 	0 0

Now, I'm going to make this up, plug in your own values as necc.:

/dev/hdd1	/usbdrive 	auto 	defaults 	0 0

 Change that line, the line that pertains to your USB drive, to read like this:

/dev/hdd1	/usbdrive 	auto 	rw,users 	0 0

Save, and reboot - you should be good to go - with read/write access.

This may also be helpful:
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

Pi Man · 09-07-2004, 09:50 PM

I already edited my fstab file to include the user and ro options, but that didn't help.

I found a solution, though. I added "uid=" and "gid=" options to fstab.

Is there a way to make it accessible to all users, though?