[SOLVED] user cant access drive filesystem

[UghUgh]

Hi,

Their is probably a very simple answer but i dont know it

Installed F16 lxde, all fine. Reconnected my removable sata drive (sdb) and reboot. Drive appears on left of file manager window but disappears when clicked and cant be accessed via terminal.

Added an entry to /etc/fstab

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Thu Nov 24 19:29:38 2011
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
UUID=e6306a85-9972-4742-9227-753f91a810cf / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=87bb7c4c-33e5-4fdd-8806-a70b60193484 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=37ee4ab7-b269-4aa7-aed4-affab4178ac1 /home ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=9b5015aa-6e59-4cbb-9864-c99cc16ea531 swap swap defaults 0 0
UUID=c4a2da89-af5b-4f4a-8c6b-2ac31eabaf5e /media/mediahd/ ext4 auto,user,noexec,rw,async 1 2

Drive is still displayed in file manager but gives the following error if clicked:

'mount: /dev/sdb1 already mounted or /media/mediahd/ busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/sdb1 is already mounted on /media/mediahd'

Opening the mount point gives:

'Error opening directory '/media/mediahd': Permission denied'

Opening the mount point in terminal gives:
'bash: cd: /media/mediahd/: Permission denied'

However it is accessible to root via terminal

Please let me know if you have any ideas, Thanks

[Gareth Jones]

Firstly, you shouldn't be explicitly mounting removable drives in /media – /media should be managed automatically by udev/udisks (it's a tmpfs, so any mount-points will be lost when you reboot). If the drive isn't automatically detected and mounted in /media, and you need to explicitly mount it or add a line to /etc/fstab, use /mnt rather than /media.

This probably isn't related to your specific problem. What does "ls -dl /mount/point/of/disk" look like? If you create a Linux filesystem like ext4 on an external drive for use as a normal user, you must set the permissions on the root directory (after mounting it – once set, the permissions will be remembered for future mounts) so that the users concerned can access it. If it's just your user on one machine, a simple "sudo chown -R username: /mount/point" will work, but for multiple users or multiple machines it gets a bit more complicated.

Gareth

[jpollard]

Also note, if the security label on the filesystem/directory is incorrect, then access may also be denied.

[UghUgh]

Ok, changing the mount point and the owner has made the files accessible to the standard user, this is great thanks Gareth

However the drive is no longer shown on the left of the file manager in the 'places' pane or under /media as under the previous F14 install. Any ideas how to restore this? Thanks

Out of interest what is the security label? is this part of SELinux?

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by jpollard

Also note, if the security label on the filesystem/directory is incorrect, then access may also be denied.

One of these days I really must make time to learn this crazy SELinux stuff!

Gareth

---------- Post added at 10:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:16 PM ----------

Originally Posted by UghUgh

However the drive is no longer shown on the left of the file manager in the 'places' pane or under /media as under the previous F14 install. Any ideas how to restore this?

Bookmarking it in Nautilus (Ctrl+d) should put it back in the left pane of Nautilus and open/save dialogs.

Gareth

[UghUgh]

Ahh.. ok that will help a great deal. What i was thinking about was that the system used to recognise it as a drive and list it in the upper pane with a hard disk icon. Currently it just shows 'audio disk' and 'xGb file system' and not the caddied SATA?!

SELinux is on the todo list, we'll see if I get that far