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I am on a dual boot machine and recently upgraded from Ubuntu 16 to Ubuntu 17. I have a 1 TB FAT32 SATA drive that was shared with Windows on Ubuntu 16 (D: on Windows, /media/willem/... on Ubuntu).

When I upgraded to 17, this device became more difficult to deal with. Many of the options in gparted are now greyed out for this device, and mounting has a new set of challenges. I can mount via:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /dos

But now only root is able to write to this drive. Attempting to change ownership via:

sudo chown -R willem:willem /dos

results in a set of errors:

changing ownership of '/dos': Operation not permitted
changing ownership of '/dos/$RECYCLE.BIN': Operation not permitted
...

I can read and modify files on this device as root but non-root users have only read permissions. All files creates by root on this drive have permissions set as 755. Trying:

sudo chmod 644 file.txt

does not change the permissions away from 755 but does not raise errors either.

Any suggestions for how to mount/configure this secondary drive properly?


Update:

Updating /etc/fstab settings from this post now allows all users read/write access to the SATA drive. Files created with Ubuntu are readable but not writeable in Windows. Files created in Windows are readable and writeable in Ubuntu. This is such a minor inconvenience that it's hardly worth bothering with. If there is a more elegant solution, or insight into why it suddenly changed when updating to Ubuntu 17, please let me know. Otherwise I'll close this thread out...

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  • Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! Your issue appears to be two-fold: (1) You can't mount the NTFS partition the same way as before any longer. Could you please edit your question to explain how exactly you tried to do that, what happened instead. Please include all encountered warning or error messages verbatim and entirely. (2) You can't set permissions or ownership on the NTFS partition. Both of them are solvable but they're independent (albeit related) issues. … Feb 25, 2018 at 9:21
  • We’re sorry, but Ask Ubuntu is not a forum, but a Question & Answer site: it works best if you ask one question, so you can receive one answer. When you ask multiple questions, you need to find one expert versed in multiple areas, which becomes unlikelier the more questions you put into, well, one question! ;-) So please, split up your question into multiple questions and drop me a comment so I can answer one of your questions. Feb 25, 2018 at 9:21
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    Possible duplicate of Mount NTFS partition at startup, with non-root user as owner
    – user68186
    Mar 16, 2018 at 16:04

1 Answer 1

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I was able to mount this drive with the proper permissions by formatting the drive to NTFS from Windows (was FAT32) and then adding the following line to /etc/fstab, inspired from this post:

/dev/sda1 /media/dos ntfs nls=iso8859-1,permissions,users,auto,exec

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