How can I change permissions on external drives?

I wanted to change permissions on my external drives that are automounted however I have tried by sudo nautilus and then going to gui and permissions and changing it however it does not let me.

I ran the ls -l and get

drwx------ 1 xbmc xbmc

the gui shows below.

owner xbmc
folder access create and delete files
file access ---

Group xbmc
folder access none
file access ---

others
folder access none
file access ---

how can I change it so that everyone has permission to access the drive and ALL folders/files inside of it. I am trying to get plexmedia server running and I cant see my drives via the webpage manage to add it to my source to be able to stream my content.

I want to change the "others" access so that I can access all my drives on the /media path to get read and write for all my folders from anywhere.

you can see my drives that are mounted here (external drives are #18,19,20) http://paste2.org/p/1754386

Solution 1:

After I purchased a new computer, I needed to get my thumb drives working on it.

Here's the procedure:

Open "Disk Utility", and look for your device, and click on it. This will let you be sure you know the correct filesystem type and device name for it. In my case, it was 'ext4' and '/dev/sdb1' respectively. Next: Decide what you want to call your thumb drive. I called mine 'USB16-C', but you choose your own name. Before closing Disk Utility, click unmount. And USER should be your login name.

Then run steps 2 to 4 in a terminal window.
sudo mkdir -p /media/USB16-C
sudo mount -t ext4 -o rw /dev/sdb1 /media/USB16-C
sudo chown -R USER:USER /media/USB16-C

Now my thumb drive is accessible, and it automatically connects when I reboot too.

Solution 2:

The answer below is actual only for obsolete releases. Modern releases such as 14.04 LTS and newer do not have PySDM package.

I was having a hard time solving the problem and this solution worked for me.

PySDM is a Storage Device Manager that allows full customization of hard disk mountpoints without manually access to fstab. It also allows the creation of udev rules for dynamic configuration of storage devices

install physical storage device manager: sudo apt-get install pysdm
open storage device manger: sudo pysdm
choose your required drives
press assist
uncheck open as read only
check owner user of file system and write your username: remon
press ok
press apply
umount Drive
mount it

Note: if you can't change files to binary executable, go to special files and check permit execution of files as binaries, and go to step 7.

Solution 3:

By default, I think it mounts it as the logged in desktop user. You will want to mount instead through the "mount" command or in he fstab:

At command line:

sudo mkdir /mnt/sdd1

Edit /etc/fstab and add to the end:

/dev/sdd1 /mnt/sdd1 fuseblk defaults,umask=022 0 0

Then at the command line (to process the /etc/fstab file again):

mount -a

There are a lot of ways to do this, more intelligent ways, etc, but the long story is that you can't get the behavior you want with chmod (especially if the filesystem is a FAT filesystem that has no native concept of permissions).

If you are interested the mount man page gives a lot of information on the subject.

Solution 4:

If your external drive is portable HDD or flash drive then it is good option to edit fstab. Because it is permanent and your drive will not connect always. If you want to mount your drive with write permission then unmount your drive first (right click on drive and unmount) or:

umount '/media/Expansion Drive'

Now mount with write permission:

mount -o rw /dev/sdXY /media/External_drive

You must create the directory first:

sudo mkdir -p /media/External_drive

Hope this will help.