I had a lot of updates today and so I updated everything with the Fedora update. After that, I cannot get into my external hard-drive. It says, “you are not authorized to mount this device”. I can see it if I log into my windows 11 boot but when I log into Fedora 42 KDE, it can’t mount. I have never had this problem before.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Open the disks utility and select a storage device:
Click on the cogwheel to display a menu of choices
Choose Take Ownership
Thanks for the reply!
Take ownership is greyed out. I have been trying to look on the internet to see how I can do it another way (i.e. CLI) but this is a little out of my league.
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
command ls -l /path-to-drive will display drive ownership.
Example:
ls -l /dev/sda
You should be able to change ownership via the chown command:
sudo chown -R user;group /path-to-drive
Example:
sudo chown -R user;group /dev/sda
Note capitol R to request recursive ownership changes
Hi,
This may sound silly, but did you reboot the machine after you updated the system ?
Not had your problem, but Dolphin fails in certain areas after an update, and i have to log out, and back in to get it to work, in that specific instance.
Regards,
Shadders.
I stuck in a flash drive and looked at the permissions and it looked exactly the same as this and I could get to the files, etc. on that drive.
I did change the permissions to me but that didn’t seem to work. I changed it to root to look like the other drive that I was testing. Still nothing.
I did that many times 
Thanks
After a while, I noticed that I can open the files. However, it takes a really long time to mount, and, it still has that message about not being authorized (as you can see in the clip).
I don’t know what is going on.
Chris, it appears that you are dealing with the first partition on /dev/sdb instead of the entire SSD ( /dev/sdb). Try the chown again specifying /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1
I did a chown on /dev/sdb to my username and that didn’t help. I did notice that after I rebooted it was root again. Not sure if this is normal but thought I would throw it out there.
Like I said earlier, it will let me into the drive but it takes like 10-15 minutes. Plus, that message is still there saying I am not authorized.
I really don’t even know where to go from here. I was pretty excited with the chown theory because it gave me some hope and thought this could be the problem. Now, I just don’t know.
You can verify what the OS thinks your user and group are.
whoami
id where name is the output of the whoami command.
I would expect to find that your username is also in the wheel group.
Hi,
In the systems settings → Users, is your account Administrator ?
Regards,
Shadders.
Yes, I am definitely administrator.
So, here is what I hope is not a silly question. Can you mount a drive in a different filesystem? The reason I ask is that when it does get mounted (i.e. I can get to the contents of the drive but still with that error and long mount time) it seems to be in exFAT. I setup this drive a couple of months ago and I was pretty sure I created it EXT4 (couldn’t swear to that but seems logical of what I would have done).
If it can, I am wondering if Windows did something and now it is stuck in exFAT format which is causing problems.
Hi,
I have mounted exFAT and an encrypted NTFS file system on an external hard drive, so Linux has no issue here.
For windows, it does not natively support EXT4, so if you have mounted the EXT4 drive on windows, did you use Windows Subsystem for Linux ?
Regards,
Shadders.
Dual boot Windows 11 and Fedora 42.
It has been working fine up until when I posted this first message. I usually don’t work with it in Windows. I usually just unmount it in Windows.
While on the subject of Windows, I disabled fast boot in Windows as I have read this can cause problems with drives not fully unmounting when leaving Windows. Didn’t help.
-Chris
Hi,
I just searched using :
windows 11 causes changes to external drive so linux cannot mount it
The results (from Google AI) indicate that Windows 11 Fast Startup can cause issues. If you did not use Windows Subsystem For Linux, then the drive could not have been EXT4.
In Windows, what does Windows state the file system is ?
Regards,
Shadders.
I normally disconnect external USB drives before running Windows Update, but once I forgot to disconnect a drive formatted with XFS used for backups. The update requested a 32GB USB drive which I provided, but during the update Windows ran out of space on the USB key. The updated continued running. When it finished, the XFS partition was overwritten with a small exFAT partition containing Windows cruft.
Gparted should allow you to see verify the partion types and sizes.
I was only using Windows so I could report problems with artifacts produced by Windows users. After the above experience and multiple updates that disabled booting Fedora, I removed Windows.
I checked out GParted and everything looks ok. It does have a flag that is set to msftdata but from what I read, I really can’t (or shouldn’t change) this.
From the internet, the following :
" I’m on a Fedora Linux (Fedora 41) and the KDE/Plasma desktop using the default Dolphin file manager when I get that message. My solution is to restart the udisks2 system service. I go into a terminal and do “sudo systemctl restart udisks2” and that clears the issue for me."
Thanks @shadders
That worked as a temporary fix. Meaning, I have to run that command every time after a reboot.
I will look into why this is causing a problem but for now, that worked.
Thanks!
Chris
