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

Category: Ubuntu

Added: 23rd of March 2016

Updated On: 23rd of December 2021

Viewed: 3,455 times

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.