Mint 8: regular user can't access ext3 partition on mounted microSD card
 

This is a problem that has me somewhat baffled, and I haven't received any help on the Mint or Ubuntu forums, so here we go:

I have an HP laptop with a recently installed copy of Mint 8 KDE Community Edition. I created the initial admin user account ("joseph") when I installed.

I had an existing home directory under a different name from another installation, so I added a user with that name ("joe") and imported a copy of the original home directory. The user "joe" didn't have the same admin privileges as the initial "joseph" account, so I added "joe" to the sudoers file and the same groups as the initial admin user.

Everything works perfectly under this arrangement, for the most part. Now here's the problem:

I have a T-Mobile G1 phone that uses Android. I've rooted and ROM-modded the G1, and have the microSD card in the phone set up with two partitions. The vfat partition stores all the photos, music and other stuff the phone needs. The ROM mod allows me to store apps on the SD card, so that second partition uses ext3 for its file system.

When I'm logged in as the admin "joseph" account and I insert the SD card in the laptop's card slot (or plug the phone into the USB port), the SD card can be mounted, and I have full access to both card partitions. I can see all folders. I do this to backup the contents of the card to an external drive (especially the apps in the ext3 partition, since that's been trashed on me once before on the phone).

However, when I log in as "joe", I cannot view the contents of the ext3 partition at all. I can see the vfat drive fine, and the ext3 partition mounts, but with user/group "joseph/joseph." When I open Dolphin to view the mounted ext3 partition, I get the error "could not enter folder /media/disk-1" at the bottom of the view window in Dolphin.

Here are the relative entries returned when I run "mount" to view the mounted drives:

/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=1001,utf8,shortname=mixed,flush)
/dev/mmcblk0p2 on /media/disk-1 type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal)

Note that the uid listed on the vfat mount is 1001, which is the gid for the "joe" account.

I know there must be a configuration setting somewhere that will allow the ext3 partition to automount under the "joe" user account. I suppose that using the admin account to change the permissions would be the easy way to do this, but there must be something that would do it automagically. I've ripped through all the config files I can find, but can't seem to find anything that would help.

All I'm looking for here is enough access to be able to copy the directories on that mount to my external drive.

If anyone has any clue about this, I'd greatly appreciate any assistance.

Many of the automatic mounts are described in the file /etc/fstab. Read the man pages for mount under the ext3 file type for options to use.

Add 'users' to the mount options for your partition and try to mount it as joe.
If that doesn't help, check the groups for each user, maybe one user is in a group that has access to the device and the other is not.

jiobo:

fstab was the first place I looked. Only the hard disk partitions and the CD drive are listed there.

Tried that early on as well. Actually, neither user was in the "users" groups, but adding the "joe" account into it didn't help. Thanks.

man mount
 

What a waste of time. Man pages are the biggest waste of time to noobies . They are full of jargon and semi-descriptive steps to do something so a newbie gets an answer that might as well be greek . A link to YouTube would be much better.

Well, if you're talking about me (the original poster), you're assuming I'm a "noobie."

Just so you know, I've been using Linux since Linus first put his original source on funet in 1991.

This problem was also solved a long time ago.