Confusion re: new Ubuntu server built with several (full) hard drives

Donny Bahama · 01-09-2014, 11:04 PM

I'm building an Ubuntu Server based media server. I did the install with a single empty drive installed. Once the initial install was complete, I connected 8 other hard drives (most of which were already full of music and/or video files).

The first puzzling thing was when I tried to open one of these drives (which was automounted at boot up.) I was required to authenticate. "An application is attempting to perform an action that requires privileges." Why?! At first I had no idea what to use as the password. I hadn't password protected these drives. Then it occurred to me - use my Ubuntu password as though this was a sudo situation. (Was it? It worked.)

Next, I wanted to get rid of all the NTFS partitions and migrate everything over to ext4. sdb1 had nothing of value on it, so I deleted it in gparted, then created an ext4 partition which I would then use to copy over all the files from sde1. When finished, I would delete the ntfs partition on sde1, create an ext4 partition and copy over everything from sdf1, etc.... But I couldn't do it; I could copy everything from sde1, but I couldn't paste it into sdb1. In fact, I couldn't even create a new folder in sdb1.

What's going on here? Are new partitions read-only by default? If so, why? And how do I fix them?

chrism01 · 01-10-2014, 04:33 AM

When you create a partition as type ext4, that just gives it a label & some metadata. You still need to put a filesystem on it (format) using

Code:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

http://linux.die.net/man/8/mkfs.ext4

descendant_command · 01-10-2014, 06:18 AM

And you will also need to mount it in a mountpoint that your user has write access to.

Smokey_justme · 01-10-2014, 06:58 AM

Could you please provide the output from:

Code:

cat /etc/fstab

schneidz · 01-10-2014, 07:41 AM

and show the output of

Code:

df -h
mount

Donny Bahama · 01-10-2014, 07:35 PM

Thanks for all the help, everyone! I should note that I have reinstalled Ubuntu Server. The first time I installed it, I chose to install Myth, which left me with Mythbuntu and a gui. I decided I really just wanted a basic file server, so I reinstalled and now I have no gui. Below are the outputs as requested. I'm going to hit the man pages for these commands so I can better understand what we're doing here.

Code:

cat /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/sdc2 during installation
UUID=7d82d364-32d4-4a4e-940f-3a049773188c /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot was on /dev/sdc1 during installation
UUID=91fb3cd2-62cc-4959-82e3-5f3d83a52a59 /boot           ext2    defaults        0       2
# /home was on /dev/sdc3 during installation
UUID=7395bae2-d6a2-4cf3-a757-32603c676bd1 /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
# swap was on /dev/sdc6 during installation
UUID=e636c775-31aa-439f-b591-5b8c134c9c2b none            swap    sw              0       0

Code:

df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc2        20G  1.3G   18G   7% /
none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev            1.8G  4.0K  1.8G   1% /dev
tmpfs           369M  960K  368M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /run/shm
none            100M     0  100M   0% /run/user
/dev/sdc1       194M   32M  152M  18% /boot
/dev/sdc3       4.8G   11M  4.6G   1% /home

Code:

mount
/dev/sdc2 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (rw)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
none on /run/user type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=104857600,mode=0755)
none on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw)
/dev/sdc1 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sdc3 on /home type ext4 (rw)
systemd on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,none,name=systemd)

schneidz · 01-10-2014, 10:29 PM

The drive in question don't seem to be mounted.

Try running
sudo fdisk -l