Second hard drive permissions revert to root on boot up

iFunction · 06-29-2016, 06:47 PM

Hi there,

I have an Ubuntu system here, with an SSD and a second HDD for storage. I have managed to get the HDD to mount on boot up, however, the permissions are always set to root.

The file system is ext4 and I have tried:

Code:

sudo chown user:user /dev/sdb1

but it still keeps going back to root when I reboot. How can I change this, as I am planning on trying to use that drive as my home folder.

Kind regards
iFunc

rknichols · 06-29-2016, 07:34 PM

The permissions on the device inode have nothing to do with the permissions on the filesystem. While the filesystem is mounted, do the chown on the mount point directory.

syg00 · 06-29-2016, 09:23 PM

And once you mount at /home, everything should be "correct" (after you copy everything over).

iFunction · 06-30-2016, 09:29 AM

@rknichols - ah, yes, of course, it mounts on /mnt/blahblahblah, I need to change ownership there then, thank you.

jpollard · 07-02-2016, 07:55 AM

BTW, the reason the ownership changed back to root is that /dev is not a permanent filesystem. It is a virtual filesystem (devtmpfs) that shows kernel data structures for the devices. Since the kernel rescans the controllers, the contents of the /dev filesystem get recreated on each boot.