Hello,

I have a 500GB SATA backup drive which I use to store all my data as I work on my Linux Mint 15 PC.

However, since yesterday, every time I'm booting my PC, things just get stuck at the boot splash with a message like Disk Drive / not ready yet or not available
with options to wait,skip or manually recover.

The only way I can get things moving, is to select the 'S' to skip.
I even tried removing this backup drive and the same message came up at the boot splash and I could not do anything but restart my PC, this time with the drive connected.

To make matters worse, suddenly, the ownership of the backup drive has been taken over by "root" and I can only access what's in there with no writing capabilities.

I tried booting the PC using Linux Mint 15 live USB and read/write all worked fine there, but coming back to the installed version of Mint brought up the same problems.

I've even tried fsck, force fsck, apt-get update

Would really appreciate some help on this, pls.

The message you are seeing will be specific to a partition on one of the drives and should list it, probably as a uuid number. Check your /etc/fstab file to see if you have the entry. If the drive is not attached when you boot and you have an entry for its partition in /etc/fstab, that would be expected behavior. If it is attached, there is some other reason.

A quick google indicates this is a fairly common problem with Ubuntu derivatives after doing an upgrade or update but, since you haven't done that it may be something else.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, Yancek.

The entry is there in the fstab. Should I remove it? Would removing it also solve the ownership problem?

Do you use it regularly and have it plugged in at all times?
If not, you could get around the problem by commenting out the entry in /etc/fstab rather than deleting it. Just put a hash mark (#) at the beginning of the line so it isn't read. That way, if it doesn't resolve the problem you know that's not it and you can remove the hash mark.

What is the entry in /etc/fstab? Do you have users allowed? What are the permissions and the owner:group for the directories you want to access?

I'm not sure what the cause of this problem is other than what I referred to above with updates. I have Ubuntu and Mint installed but don't boot them very often and occasionally see this message. I just hit the 'S' key and proceed because I don't use them often enough to bother with it.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yep, it's used full-time.
I did comment it's entry in the fstab

Entry in the fstab:Permissions for this whole drive and files/folders within have suddenly changed to root as in the snapshot I've attached.

Now all my VM's are inaccessible 'cos they're all stored in this drive.

Attached Thumbnails

 

login as root and issue;

chown -R fkasmani /media/datadrive

or, if fkasmani is part of the sudoers group;

sudo chown -R fkasmani /media/datadrive

should change all ownership of files stored on /media/datadrive to being owned by fkasmani.

The image you posted shows owner:group as root:root so you should be able to write to the partition as root. If you want to write to it as a user, you will need to either change the owner or change the group to a group the user is a member of and give that group write permissions. You could also put 'users' in the options in fstab.

This is the standard method. You neglected to mention in your previous posts that this is a windows partition/filesystem which does make a difference. You need to have ntfs-3g installed. Take a look at the link below for more details on writing to windows:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NTFS-3G

The link below is specific to Arch Linux so there may be some differences with Mint. Another link with more general info, Opensuse but nothing that should not work with other Linux distributions. Not sure you want to give everyone write permissions, that can be risky depending on how many users you have??

http://tropenhitze.wordpress.com/201...opensuse-11-2/

The owner:group of a directory or directories does not usually change of its own accord. Not sure what happened to change it or if it changed, that you were able to write as a non-root user previously.