Greetings all,

I am back to using debian etch after a long spell on win2000.

I was having some difficulty getting a win2000 hdd to mount on boot. To check on things I switched to root and browsed the mount folder where I located the hdb1 and hdb5 drives. Whilst there I decided to copy roughly 50gb files over to my /home folder from the hdb5 ntfs drive. Later I rebooted and browsed my /home as user and noticed all the files I transferred over have little padlocks on them. Is there a quick fix for this to make them usable as user?

cheers

Change ownership of the files. To change ownership to the normal user, do

You need to change the permissions/ownership of them. Since you copied the files over as root, they are almost certainly owned by root, which is why your ordinary user can't read them.

The first thing to do is check the file permissions and ownership; this is most easily achieved through a terminal. Once in a terminal, navigate to the directory where the files are stored using the cd command. Once there, type ls -l and check the 1st and 3rd columns. The first shows the permissions for owner, group and others, the third column is who owns the file.

To change the permissions, you need to use the chmod command. To change the ownership, use the chown command. Both need to be run as root if root currently owns the files.

edit: beaten to the punch!

Many thanks for your quick replies!! I shall follow you suggestions when I boot the debian beastie up in the morning. I dwell on the east coast of Australia and it is now 11pmish and my brain bits that are still functioning are about to call it a day. I'll report back tomorrow. cheers