I have a used 500 GB external hard drive that I've been trying to use under Linux mint 18 1... I'm locked out of it for some reason. I can not drag and drop files into it, The "create folder" option is grayed out on the File menu. Why can't I write to it!?




I've goggled my fingers sore, but still have no idea what I need to do to get it working...

I first deleted the existing partition... Then...
In gparted I clicked on Device>and Created a Partition Table.
Next I created a new partition on sdb by going to Partition and selecting the ext4 partition...
This was done in Linux 18 1... Cinnamon version 4.4.0-53-Genetic

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With the drive connected, what is the output of these commands?

You may have to issue the commands as root.

Be sure to surround the output of the commands with "code" tags, which become available when you click the "Go Advanced" button at the bottom of the "compose post" window.

Listen carefully. With the external hard drive connected, powered on and mounted run the following command:
That should do it.

I am not familiar with root... Never heard of it before..

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There is a lot that I am not familiar with here, and feel that I am not understanding like I would like too...

There is something wrong on my end with the reading that I am getting from garted reading of the drive... So I will post more when I get it sorted...

OK got that sorted...
I am assuming that according to this screenshot that the drive is mounted...

sudo chmod 777 /media/marz/500 gb storage

Linux is case sensitive. You ran:
But you should have run:
If interested, I can give a more complete explanation of what you are doing. Basically, you have a permission problem which is typical when you format a new drive to a linux file system. You have to change the permissions on the partition for your external hard drive so you have write access on the partition. You do that by changing the permissions on the mount point of the external hard drive with the chmod command while the drive is mounted. We may be having some trouble determining the mount point of the external drive. From your screen shot it appeared to be "/media/marz/500 GB Storage". You have to be sure the external drive is powered on and mounted when you run the command or it won't work.

Edit: Reread your posts and screen shots and I think I see your problem. When you created the partition you also created a label for the partition which has spaces in the the label name, namely "500 GB Storage". When the bash shell encounters spaces like that it stops and tries to run the command on a file named "/media/marz/500" which does not exist. It's generally a better practice to not put spaces in partition labels for this reason. You can workaround it by running:
Try that and see if it runs.

You need to understand first that Mint and most any Linux system is created as a multi-user system and that in most cases, the standard user does not have full access to anything outside the /home/user directory (in your case /home/marz). You can give yourself access by either changing the owneershipt or changing the permisssions and in your case, changing the ownership would be simpler and cause fewer potential problems. Also, as pointed out above, when you are running commands in a terminal you should not have spaces in directory names. To avoid the problems you had in running these commands, put quotes around the command.

The fdsik -l command got an error because you tried to run it as a user not root using sudo.
Change the ownership of your directory mount point for the external drive partition:

As pointed out above, case sensitivity applies so if it is "GB" not "gb" or "Storage" not "storage" you need to enter that correctly. The above would give the user "marz" full read/write access to that partition.

adding to what @yancek said

this is what I do, if it is not NTFS which requires ntfs-3g, then using root or sudo I change it,
the group is added due to one then can get access to it if they belong into that group as well.

yancek, see my post. He has spaces in his partition label name. Mint's auto-mounter is creating a mount point at /media/marz/ with that partition label name complete with spaces. This is causing the error he's getting. You need to use the backslash escape character to get around the problem.

Thank you kilgoretrout...

Solved...

Thank you also to the rest of you who contributed to this thread...

Putting quotes around the command accomplishes the same thing without the escape character on every Linux I've used.
Giving read/write/delete permissions to anyone with access to the computer (777 permissions) is generally not a good idea other than for purposes of testing or perhaps some insignificant files/directories. Doing it for an entire partition can lead to all kinds of problems is the user isn't careful.

you could also just change the name of it to 500_GB_Storage or 500-GB-Storage or 500GBStorage etc...