Category: Ubuntu

Added: 23rd of March 2016

Updated On: 23rd of December 2021

Viewed: 3,753 times

This article was updated and rechecked on 23rd of December 2021

Unable to access files on external drive on Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distribution, change ownership and group using chown -R

After creating a new user account on Ubuntu mate and then logging in, I plugged in my external hard drive only to find I was unable to access any of the files on the drive, as the ownership and group was assigned to the other user

To solve this issue I did the following:

First of all I located the path to my external hard drive by entering the following command

cd /media/{username}


I then ran the following command to display the contents of the media directory, which displayed UUID number for my external drive.
dir


After this I changed ownership and group of the drive using the chown -R command.
The -R argument means that all files and folders inside the directory will also change ownership and group
sudo chown -R {username}:{username} /media/{username}/b69e1300-73a6-423d-bfaa-90827fe412fe/


I was then able to access all the files on the drive.