I have a 32 GB USB micro SD card. It was once used to try out "Multiboot", which did not work at all and left the SD chip unusable. I've had a lot of trouble with it (presumably a bad product?) but have finally managed to access it with gParted and the Mint "Disks" utility. (Running Mint 18.2 Cinnamon)

1. gpt partition, formatted Fat32

2. owner is root, other users have no access

3. other USBs mount as user "me" - so why is this one owned by "root" - this is the key question here, I think. How do I change the ownership from "root" to "me"? None of the suggestions found in forums have worked.

4. does an fstab entry occur automatically, or do I have to add it, as there is nothing in fstab for it??

5. when I plug it in, should it not show up in /media somewhere when it's mounted??

6. in order to use it as a boot stick, does it have to start in Fat? That might sound silly, but it seems that most of the programs that make bootable sticks have you start with that, and apparently I can't change ownership of Fat 32?

Any clarification on how I'm doing this wrong would be greatly appreciated!

What's on the disk now, anything? Still have your multiboot files there? Did you create a new partition table on it with GParted? Do you see an entry for it in /etc/mtab after you insert it? Generally with the newer Ubuntu's (such as Mint) a drive plugged in will show under /media/user.

I would not expect it needs to be fat32, what are you using it for? Creating a bootable device with an iso on it generally uses Fat32.

I don't know what the heck was going on, but when I tried it in my other freshly rebooted box, with Ubuntu Mate, it worked fine.
So I put music on it and stuffed it into an android phone. Tunes!
Done with it.

This is a fairly new box, an i7 chip, 16 GB RAM and 3 TB disk space. Got it in July.

So far every OS on here has gone weird - it started with Windows 10, which did odd things, then Linux Mint 18.1 Cinn., then Ubuntu Mate 16.04, and now again Mint 18.2.

Every OS has had issues with USBs and permissions, and every OS has had incidences where stuff just stops working; and I don't have a clue what the problem is.

Can someone recommend something to test this hardware? Or is there some known issue that might be responsible?

You need to mount it with the "user" option. A suitable fstab entry is the way to go.
No. Only installer programs create fstab entries automatically. Anything else you must enter yourself, using an editor.
Only if it is mounted on a point in the media tree. You need to create a mountpoint for it, then create your fstab entry with that mountpoint specified.
The problem is that FAT, being a Windows filesystem, doesn't recognise the concept of ownership. When you mount a partition, mount assigns some kind of owner to the files (root unless you specify the user option), but booting is a different matter.

You can boot from an ext4 stick, but you have to install extlinux as the bootloader. Syslinux only works with FAT.

Thank you, hazel.

Why does this box, with different distros, do this stuff with USBs when my other machine does not? Is there something(s) I can change that will get rid of this issue?

I was just going to blow it away again and re-install, but I'm worried it won't help.

I don't have a lot of experience with Mint, but it was my impression the last time I ran it, that it mounts usb drives automatically for users in the plugdev group. A lot of distros don't do that. Personally I hate the idea of things being mounted "behind my back", but some people love it because it's so convenient.

Don't reinstall! That's seldom necessary with Linux and you never learn anything by doing that. Most problems can be fixed with a little editing. First step is to look at your /etc/fstab file.

Is this a branded system or a "home bake" job? Can you supply any details; manufacturer, model No. type, etc of the complete system or motherboard in the second instance just in case there is a hardware issue with the USB ports that can be researched. There may be something in the BIOS (or equivalent) which affects USB access but... No details, can't check.

Play Bonny!

The install basically died - other things started acting up - music player skipping, browser opening and closing - I wasn't kidding about "cyberspace-style haunted".

Anyway, I ran out of ability to deal with my frustration and blew it away - I was getting too freaked. In all the years I've never seen such craziness in a PC. No idea what to make of it.

We'll see what comes up in a fresh install.

2 separate hard drives, newly partitioned, formatted and loaded up, one with Mint 18.2 Cinnamon, one with Ubuntu Mate 16.04.3. (This computer has so far been unable to download a copy of Fedora that works. Strange also, no?)

Everything apparently fine except that with both installs:

any new partitions made by gParted are owned by root. Hard drives and USBs. No difference, if gParted created the partition it is owned by root.

I'm completely at a loss. Am diligently searching out partitioning info on the one hand (and so far getting nowhere), and other hardware issues that may be responsible for this box's bad JuJu on the other. Can't afford to replace it.

Somewhat Sisyphus-like, I'm starting to feel.

So what's the problem? All disk devices are owned by root, with group owner disks.

Or are you talking about the mount points for those devices? On my system, they are owned by root too.

If I partition a USB or HDD, all the permissions are root and all users are read only.
On my other machine(s) this does not happen, I partition a disk and away we go.

On this one I have 3 partitions on 2 disks. One was an NTFS holdover from when this was a windows box. When I redid that partition to ext4, it became read-only also. Any USBs end up the same. I can't access them.

In the past week, I've done and this has happened with every one. 5 new, clean installs of different distros. Never happened to me on any other box. The other one is where I try to fix the USBs, but I can't move the actual hard drive over to it for now.

I'm way out of my depth here.

Whoa! This has failed every other time I've tried it - all of a sudden it worked!

sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /media/mynewdrive

Been trying that for days, and while it appeared to work it never actually changed the owner before. Wonder why? I dang near sent this box out the window!!