I have a 320 GiB HDD with 4 partitions with 1 distro installed on each partition. I also have one large partition for storage.

I can save anything to the large partition because of no permission.

How do I get pemission to thie drive?

Note: I don't get why it is doing this because I set up a smaller 60 GiB HDD the same way and there were not permission issues.

You need to give more information.
What filesystem is it on "storage", where is it mounted
What are the permissions on the storage mount-dir, including lowerlevel.
What groups is your user assigned to. (Any language-freaks outh there - should it be "is" or "are"?)

You have 3 distros so you need to go through this on all.

I think the answe to this is ext4 since it has been formatted to ext4

don't know

don't know, don't know what this means.

Funny thing, I only repeated the steps I followed on a 60 GiB drive. I had zero problem saving stuff to the storage partition on that drive. With the success I enjoyed on the 60 GiB drive, I decided to repeat the saems steps, and wind up with a larger storage partition. BUT in this case, I have no permissions.

I am wondering, does it matter if I create that partition while boted in one of the distros or if I am boted in the installation medioum on the USB drive?

Do you have the partition mounted? If so, where?

The partition will be there in any case but whether it is accessible depends upon how you did it. You would need to create a mount point and mount the partition on each of your distributions.

All I seem to remember is that, while in gparted, I right clicked on the unallocated space, selected "new" and slid the sizing grips to create a 200 GIG partition, slected ext4 and then "create" then clicked on the green check mark to excute the operation.

I don't remember being given any choices during that process that would prevent or grant permission. If memory serves, I am pretty sure that I did the same exact thing when I did this with a 60 gig drive and had no permission issues for saving stuff to the "storage" partition when booted in either of the distros.

The 320 GIG drive was used and has major mechanical issues and I am planning to buy a nice new one, but I will want to make sure that when I set up the new one, that I enjoy the same permissions that I have/do with this 60 GIG drive.

So, to your point
For this fture drive, how should I proceed in oder not to run into this again? (and wy id it wok so well or the 50 gig with no problems?)

Thanks

Using GParted is done as root user so there would be the default permissions.

You indicate you did this previously on another drive. Did you create this data partition during or after the install? Did you have four separate operating systems on the previous drive?

So in addition to answering the previous questions which you did not respond to, how did you create the partition? Did you use a LiveCD on a flash drive or CD/DVD? Did you did it from one of the installed Linux systems?

The first thing you would need to do is find out what the partition is. Since you have four Linux installs, it would probably be a logical partition so let's use sda6 as an example. You can find this by logging in as root and running the command: fdisk -l(Lower Case Letter L in the command). That will show your partitions and you should be able to identify it by size.

Once you know what it is, create a mount point which is basically a directory. For sda6 you would do as root: mkdir /mnt/sda6
Then mount it: mount -t ext4 /dev/sda6 /mnt/sda6

You need to do this for each distribution you have installed. If you want them mounted on boot, you will need entries in each systems /etc/fstab file.

On the 60 gig, I may have created the additional partitions from the installed distro.

On the 320 gig, I definitely used the live media. Does that make a difference?

Also, I don't know how to, or if I am or ever logged in as root.

So let me ask this. When I set up the installed version, while in the live media, there was a point during each installation process whn it asked me for a user name and password. Was that a root password or was that just a user? If it was a root password, then am I not logged in as root whenever I log into the computer on boot up?

If not, then how do I log in as root?

Also, as far as

I follow that I can enter these sequentially from the terminal, but as far needing entries in fstab, would that be as simple as adding a lines that say

to the end of the body of text which is already there?

Thanks much for your responses.

Is this in reference to the 'large' data partition? If you created the data partition from the live medium, it will still be available from your 4 different distributions as long as it is formatted, you have a filesystem on it.

I expect that was a user password. I've never installed a Linux distribution which uses root that did not specifically inform me that I needed to create a password for the root user. Some distributions do not use root but rather use sudo and the primary user password. That would be how you would get root privileges and if you are using Ubuntu or one of its derivatives, this would apply. You haven't given any information on which distributions you are using so there is no way for anyone here to give an accurate answer.

No. A sample entry for an fstab entry for a Linux data partition on sda9.

You can use the Search function here at LQ to get other sample entries and there are thousands of tutorials on fstab online where you can get more info. An explanation of fstab entries is at the link below:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/..._and_explained

Right, The distros are Ubuntu, Mint(a derivative of Ubuntu), SolydX (a derivative of Mint-Debian), and all use "sudu" followed by the ned to input a pasword.

thanks for the info

Something occurred to me. I just wanted to make sure we are on the same page. I have no trouble "mounting" the storage drive. I double click on it, and it opens up, and if there were any files in it, I am guessing that I could open them. In fact, if I had opened it prior to running gparted, I would have to choose "unmount" to do anything with it, like delete it, or resize it etc.

So, it looked like most if not all of the advice above is for "mounting" it, when that is not the problem. It just won't let me save anything to it. Is this then, still the same description of tactics to get it where I want it to be?

In the second post above, member 'pingu' asked you for the permissions and you never responded. The distributions you mention usually mount in the /media directory so you could find the owner:group and permissions by simply doing: ls -l /media/

So after getting some advice on another forum, then trying severl scenarios, this is what works.

The storage partition is roughly 200 gig and is at location sda12, so

Edit est/fstab by adding the following line

to make sure sda12 is mounted
to grant permissions to sda12, at the terminal enter
This "sticks" after shutdown and reboot. I don't have to do this evenry session. I have permissions to the storage drive every time I boot up.

Still don't have an answer as to why I did not have to do this with a 60 gig drive I was using.

Oh My! I just tried my own advice with a new, larger hard drive. As I am adding distros to partitions, I have to edit fstab in each distro to grant permission to the storage drive.

I just found out the hard way the the "/" MUST MUST MUST be at the end of the word "storage" in that last line of code in my previous post.

so...run this in terminal to grant permission

notice the minor diference in this and the way I wrote it in the previous post. Very important....