Teach me how to access my other drives! Kubuntu10.04, can't write to other partitions
 

I have an AMD 64 bit desktop.
I just now re-installed Kubuntu 10.04.
The GUI method of accessing other partitions (of ext3 file systems), will not let me write to them.

I open Dolphin (KDE file manager), select my drive, then attempt to drag a file into it or right click in attempt to make New Folder. None of this works. It seems I am locked out. The partitions are on the same HDD as the OS.

I have not tried anything via console. I don't know how to use it.

This is NEWBIE thread so please make it simple for me and other newbies. If you instruct me to type something into console, please explain what it is I would be doing to my system. I beg you to not just suggest me to "enter this, enter that" and leave me blind.

Thank you for your time.

Try this (worked for kubuntu 8.04).

Open Dolphin. Do NOT select the partition.

Right-click the partition. This should open a menu with "Open as root" or something similar.

If "Open as root" is dimmed, then the partition is already mounted read-only. Select "Unmount" from the same menu, then right-click the partition again to re-open the menu.

Select "Open as root" and type your password. This will mount the partition with write-access.

If this doesn't work, please post back exactly what happened.

Oh, don't forget to unmount the partition when you're finished. :)

The right-click menu only gives 3 options:
Unmount drive,
Add entry,
Hide entry.

Before you jump to conclusions, whether the drive is currently mounted or not, I can NOT write to the drive.

I should describe how I want this to work (which is how I managed to get a previous installation to operate):
I want to boot my machine, select any drive I want, and use my files, no matter what partition or physical HDD they are on.
On another machine I was able to get a gui dialog for password to access drives. I am OK with that.


I DON'T want to type to console every time I boot, or every time I want to use another drive.

There is no MS Windows involved. All file systems are ext3.

Do you know what the permissions are? Because that's what seems to be the problem.
If you open Dolphin, click on the partition you want to create a file/folder in under Places on the left of the window, do you see the folders/files? Is this where you cannot write to? If so, right-click on any folder, click properties, click the Permissions tab in the new window. Who is the owner? group? permissions are? You would need rw permissions for whatever user you are using to create a folder or write to the folder. I don't have Kubuntu so I can't be any more specific. If you could check the above and post the responses if you are unable to resolve the issue.

Only a "lost + found" folder exists there.
Owner: root
The permissions on it:
drwx--

Haribol?

That doesn't sound good. Are you able to open the lost + found folder?
I would expect that to mean an empty partition?? I did see a post on Ubuntu forums a while ago which had a similar situation. Only a lost + found directory. The poster found that all his folders/files were actually there, in the lost + found directory.

Since the permissions only allow root any access, you would have to either use a terminal or open dolphin as root (sudo). I don't have Kubuntu installed so I'm not sure what you would do. I have kde and dolphin but on PCLinux and I can type kdesu dolphin and I am prompted for the root password, enter it and I'm in dolphin as root. Since you indicate you were able to do this on an earlier version, was that with Kubuntu? You don't remember how you did it? Since Kubuntu is an Ubuntu derivative, I expect is uses sudo instead of su.


Have you tried the method at this site? Hold the Alt+F2 keys down simultaneously and enter the "kdesu xterm", replace xterm with dolphin

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubunt...-as-root-user/

If that doesn't work, go to a terminal and at the prompt, type: mount
Post the output which will tell which partitions you have and their mount point. It won't change anything or enable you to access anything but will provide information for someone who may be a little more familiar with Kubuntu.

Thanks, Yancek.

I can not open the lost + found.

The partition is clean, newly written to ext3 file system with Gparted, then actually written the same again (out of habit) with the official Kubuntu 10.04 CD when I re-installed my Kubuntu.

Is there a way to set the permissions to normal "douchebag" user? I want all HDD's and partitions and thumbs etc to mount and be useable upon boot. The less interference, the better.

Yes EricTRA walked me through a series of steps to do just this, with Kubuntu 9.04, 9.10. I have since lost the thread, and I can t remember what my LQ handle was at the time. That is an abandoned account, due to hiatus, and loss of access to account, email, etc... I have searched for the thread and old profile and simply cant find it.

The results of "mount" at console prompt:

I did the alt+F2 trick. It is effective indeed, but highly inconvenient:

1. Every time I want to open another drive, I will need to do the keystroke, then enter password when prompted in dialog box, instead of simply using my KDE QuickAccess browser. I am constantly opening and closing things, Dolphin included, so doing these steps every time is not good.

2. The default theme, color scheme etc is shown on that root Dolphin window. This is not so much an esthetic concern, but a practical one, as I keep very dark color themes for my eyeball problems. The default gray is too bright.

What I want is to open any any any internal drive, external drive, removable drive, any partition, without doing ANYTHING different than I already do. I just want to set it up one time, so that I HAVE full access to every part of my machine, every time I boot, without any extra steps. In my home there is no concern for machine security.

Does all this mean that I will use my machine as root all the time?

What does that mean?

How is that set up?

I did this:

I don't know why my all-important /dev/sda4 (ext3) partition is not shown.
Also, there should be a small /dev/sda2 (ext3).

As you can see from your mount output, your sda4 and sda5 partitions are in the /media directory. sda1 is your root filesystem. Use the Alt +F2 to log in as root, click the red Root icon in the left column to get to the / of the filesystem, navigate to the /media directory and once again, check the owner/group and permissions for the disk and disk-1 directories which are sda4 and sda5 respectively. I expect they are root:root. You need to change the owner:group to what you want as well as the permissions. If you change the owner to whatever user name you use, you may be able to write to it but you should be able to see this.

If you want these partitions mounted at boot, you need an entry in fstab. Below is a sample I use for a data partition:

The above is just an example and you will need to make changes to the entry, change /mnt/data to /media/disk in your case for sda4 and then add a second entry for /media/disk-1 sda5. To find what each column means you can google it, actually this site explains it pretty well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fstab

Use the Alt+F2 method to navigate to the /etc/fstab file to open it as you will need to be root. Don't know what the standard text editor is in Kubuntu, kwrite??

Don't know what happened to your sda2. You might look in /media directory to see if there is another disk-2(?) folder.

Now that I think about it, someone once suggested a code that made a gui dialog for password pop up, which turned on all root privilages for my user account. I think it was KDESU or KDESUDO or something like that. It was very convenient.

Anybody know of this?