Flash Drive Permission

I’m trying to move a file into an external flash drive, but my laptop won’t let me. When my fresh install of Fedora 33 mounts the disk, it ends up owned by root:root with permissions rwxr-xr-x, so my regular user account cannot write to it.

I use Fedora 33 on my Thinkpad P14s laptop.

How can I change my settings so that external media auto mounts with more sane permissions?

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This depends on the filesystem you formatted the drive to.

In case of a native filesystem which supports ownership and access permissions:

# Mount the filesystem
sudo mount /dev/name /mnt

# Become filesystem owner
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) /mnt

# Or provide write permissions for everyone
sudo chmod a+w /mnt

Otherwise change the default mount options adding this one:

umask=0

Does that mean:

If using NTFS / FAT32 / exFAT formated USB drive, any user can mount and have read/write access.

If using ext4/btrfs/xfs formated USB drive, then it will be always root owned only?
Does it matter if the USB is:

  • created using my current account in the current computer
  • created using same named account in another computer

On my system when I plug in a USB drive it auto-mounts at /run/media/user/drive/ and the user can normally access everything on the drive. There have been a couple times where I had to change to /run/media/user and “sudo chown user:user drive” after which every time I reused that drive my user had access.

If the file system on flash drive is ntfs, ntfs-3g set permissions to read-only if the file system has a problem or windows safe files to boot from hibernate or faststartup.

try fix file system (if ntfs) .

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sd…

to force mount and remove hiberfile (not recommended ).

sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -o remove_hiberfile /dev/sd… /mnt

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