0

I have newly installed Ubuntu 14.04 for a media server. My problem is that I have all the media on external USB drives. The drives are write/readable by the user & Files explorer but Plex Media Server and other applications cannot even read the drives. I've read several-dozen articles and tried various chmod and chown commands but some say "Operation not permitted" when trying to change permissions to 770 or 777. I've even tried to change the properties of the folders in the GUI and for group access, as soon as you change to "access files", "list files only", or "create and delete files" it quickly snaps back to "NONE". I've reformatted the drive several times trying exFat, NTFS, Fat32, HFS+, & EXT2 but the behavior is exactly the same on each. I've also been unable to find any way to change how it is mounted as most of the articles are for older versions of Ubuntu that don't apply any more. (Also, I make new media on a Mac so I want a format that is compatible and quick -NTFS proved to be too slow on Mac)

Any help?

1
  • I partitioned the local drive and the partion has the same issue. I can write/read to it but no apps can see it.
    – oneaustin
    Jun 23, 2014 at 22:14

2 Answers 2

1

Ok, I found an article that explained why this wasn't working for me. I had all usb drives mounting under /media/<myusername>/<drive_name> and this made mandatory permissions on it. I unmounted the drive and set it to mount under /media/ then it works.

0
  1. Unmount the drive
  2. Create the mounting folder, give it full access permissions

    sudo mkdir /media/drive_name
    sudo chmod 777 /media/drive_name
    

    Late releases, like 14.04, create a user sub-folder so it will be /media/username/drive_name

  3. Mount it again

1
  • I followed instructions but nothing changed. The commands gave no output but after step 3 I checked and still am unable to modify permissions. Plex cannot see the folders or files in the drive.
    – oneaustin
    Jun 23, 2014 at 11:26

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .