I am having a problem moving files on or to my external HD. Everytime I try to move something there or move a file to a different folder I get a"permission denied" error message. Under properties the owner for that drive is listed as"root"."Other Users" can read and execute, but not write. I have tried to change this by opening up pcmanfm as a superuser and ticking the"write" box, but the settings won't stick.

What am I doing wrong?

What is the external hd formatted as? ext3, fat, ntfs?

anticapitalista wrote:What is the external hd formatted as? ext3, fat, ntfs?

Sorry, I should have included that info. It's formatted as fat32.

There are some solutions here:


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Thanks for the fast reply and the link, but those solutions aren't working. I modified fstab as suggested in the tutorial and I only got an"fstab line X is bad" error.

It's ok, if I need to move something to the external HD I'll just run pcmanfm as root for the few seconds it takes to transfer the file.

What did you do exactly?

I added this line that I got from the turorial:

UUID=AD74-85CA /path_to/mount_point vfat umask=0000,utf8 0 0

and modified it to look like

UUID=632D-1607 /media/MY BOOK vfat umask=0000,utf8 0 0

and ran 'mount -a'. It was then that I got the message that fstab was bad.

This is what my fstab looks like, unmodified:

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
/dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
/dev/hda6 swap swap sw,pri=1 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
# Dynamic entries below
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs-3g noauto,users,gid=users,dmask=002,fmask=113,relatime 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0

I now see the top line in fstab, but there was nothing about uDev in the tutorial. Is that what I should be modifying?

You could try to set the owner for that partition for yourself. When you right-click its empty background with pcmanfm as root and choose properties, set the owner for yourself and the group for users.

Or use rox-filer instead of pcmanfm

secipolla wrote:You could try to set the owner for that partition for yourself. When you right-click its empty background with pcmanfm as root and choose properties, set the owner for yourself and the group for users.

"Operation not permitted"

anticapitalista wrote:Or use rox-filer instead of pcmanfm

rox-filer gives the same permissions error.

This may be the problem
You have a space in"MY BOOK". Perhaps use"MyBook" instead. Spaces in file folders and names and be a bit tricky.

john

For the permission errors, try launching rox or pcmanfm as root. Then you should be able to follow the posted advice. You may want to try this before my idea.

john

OU812 wrote:This may be the problem

You have a space in"MY BOOK". Perhaps use"MyBook" instead. Spaces in file folders and names and be a bit tricky.

john

Good thought, but unfortunately it doesn't work. I just get a message that MYBOOK is not a valid mount point. I tried it with My_Book as well, same message.

As for the permissions errors, launching pcmanfm or rox as root doesn't solve the problem because apparently the ownership can't be changed in that way on a fat32 formatted drive.

Thanks very, very much for your help, but it really isn't a huge problem, so I'll just work around it.

Tried this (
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) variant of fstab line already?

Greetings

The"not a valid mount point" error sometimes means the folder does not exist. just make a folder in /media called MyBook and try again, (capitalization matters.)