Unable to access files on external drive on Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distribution, change ownership and group using chown -R
ID: 75
Category: Ubuntu
Added: 23rd of March 2016
Updated On: Tutorial updated and rechecked on 23rd of December 2021
Views: 3,978
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.
