Another question About Fedora40, I have finished loading my system and now wanted to connect my existing drives, They already do mount on boot, but, they only show up in files under Other locations in the GUI. Also, I can not write to them.
If I try to change the permissions from the GUI (right click on drive > properties > Permissions ) I get a message saying, you are not the owner. I tried following this thread, but had no luck.
How does one do this? Must it be done via fstab ?
I have read a few things but do not want to mess things up as these drives contain data that I do not want to loose. All the drives are NTFS one shows GUID Partitionthe others show Master Boot Partition from Disk…
The NTFS filesystem was designed by Microsoft and is proprietary. The driver in Linux for accessing NTFS filesystems is a bit of a reversed-engineered implementation that may not support all of NTFS’s native features. Since the NTFS driver in Linux is not the NTFS driver from MS, it can be a bit risky to mix and match filesystem updates between the drivers. If at all possible, I would recommend that you format another drive with a Linux-native filesystem such as XFS or Btrfs and copy the files you want from NTFS to the new drive.
Edit: If you really need a filesystem that is interoperable with other operating systems, I would suggest exFAT. The main drawback of exFAT is that it isn’t journaled, so you must unmount the filesystem (and wait for the data to be “flushed” to the device) before physically disconnecting the device (but really you should do that with any filesystem, journaled or not). exFAT also lacks support for some common features used in Linux such as symbolic links and POSIX file permissions. But you likely won’t need those features unless you are trying to store system files on the device (typical user documents, pictures, videos, downloads, etc. don’t need individualized permissions or any form of redirection that file links would provide).
This kind of issue is not limited to dual boot, but also happens when the filesystem is corrupted due to hardware or driver failures.
The above link provides a way to bypass the problem, or you can use Windows to fix NTFS errors if any.
I worked in an “enterprise” environment where mission-critical applications ran on linux and macOS, but Windows was the “corporate standard”. Many colleagues were in similar environments but countries with languages that use glyphs not found in ASCII. Attempts to move data between Windows and linux using portable drives met with problems: different length restrictions on file paths, differences in permission models, and character set issues. Users needed to be careful to chose file names and directory structures that were supported by both systems. One strategy was to assign very simple names and maintain a database with the original name (often software generated).
I started to write a howto on mounting with udisks2 but it doesnt yet include fixing the file ownership. Afaik this is possible during the mount though.
In fstab too.
I just used a bunch of NTFS drives and they worked normally. Directly coming from windows, no step in between.
Also in addition to exFAT, UDF is also cross platform I heard
The drives are seen under Files>Other Locations in Fedora, I can copy material from them but not to them, or create files or folders on them, these were not OS drives but only data storage under windows, I should on these drives not require crossplatform support as they are internal to the pc, I have not had issues yet with any of the external drives that I use, I just need to be able to write data to the drives that I am not yet able to do.
Not sure what you mean by “crossplatform support”. The differences in handling of permissions and allowed names for paths and files that cause problems using NTFS filesystems from linux are the same for internal and external drives. man ntfs-3g provides some options for permissions and mapping user and group names that need to go in fstab. There are examples in Arch Linux NTFS-3G.
Copy the NTFS data to a Linux filesystem such as XFS or btrfs. You may encounter some files that need manual work (name/permission cleanup) – doing it all at once avoids situations where a file that needs manual tweaks is urgently required.
I have been using XFS for decades (starting on SGI IRIX64) and still use it for mechanical drives, but use btrfs on SSD’s. For important irreplaceable data on XFS I add checksums so I can verify that a file has not suffered from bitrot.
I would generate checksums for important files on NTFS and then verify them after transfer to a linux filesystem.
I need sdb1 and sdc1 to mount on startup AND I need to take ownership of those drives. I need help to do this please…
sdd2 I will still need to copy the info from and then format, after which I can then mount and take ownership of, I need to get the first two drives to behave as intended under the GUI so that I may use them normally.
In general, ownership of linux filesystems can be managed after the filesystem is mounted, using command-line tools that have been around since Unix was created and were used by macOS. You may want to refer to Linux Command for those.
Do you really want those drives mounted all the time or is “on-demand” automounting a better choice? Many web pages discuss automatically mounting USB drives when they are plugged in, so the the “automount” term is often (ab)used to mean either “mount at boot” or “mount when drive is connected”.
The advantages of on-demand mounting are shorter boot times and reduce chances for accidental damage from a command or mouse click mistake.
You can add entries to /etc/fstab for the new disks using the labels or UUIDs (avoid using sdAN as those can change, e.g., when a drive fails) following man 5 fstab and using lines from the existing file as examples.
Disks are mounted with root ownership of the mount directory and user ownership is assigned using the chown and chmod command with the -R option to apply recursively the ownership changes to sub-directories. You may want to read the LinuxCommand.org chapter on permissions and the man pages and do some simple exercises on a some test directory tree to make sure you understand the what you are doing before making massive changes to the two new filesystems.
After another month of not having a pc I am now back on this topic, I have read and consumed some of the inner workings of setting up my HDD’s as documents inside Fedora’s files GUI, but I have done this from within the terminal via CLI, I have a question.
I deleted my 4TB drives partition, used fdisk to re-create it as a GPT partition with one volume.
I then formated the disk using mkfs with the .ext4 option to create an .ext4 file system. Once done and after creating a mount point in /etc/fstab the disk shows up with ext2 and not ext4 see below.
Some feedback as to why this might happen would be good. I even went back and formatted it again making sure that I used .ext4 for the file system but, this changed nothing.
I did mount the disk and took ownership with chown and checked that it works…
The mkfs command does not take a .ext4 option. Perhaps you meant that you passed the -t ext4 option to mkfs? There is also a mkfs.ext4 command, but since that isn’t what you said, I assume that isn’t what you meant.
SYNOPSIS
mkfs [options] [-t type] [fs-options] device [size]
OPTIONS
-t, --type type
Specify the type of filesystem to be built. If not specified, the default filesystem type (currently ext2) is
used.
A correct command would be either sudo mkfs -t ext4 -L YouTube /dev/sdd1 (deprecated) or (recommended) sudo mkfs.ext4 -L YouTube /dev/sdd1.