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?