GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 618947
Formatted external drives owned by root, not all users
Last modified: 2010-05-19 15:59:25 UTC
I'm using ubuntu 9.10 Whenever I partition an external usb drive with the ext4 filesystem, I cannot write to the drive because it is owned by root. I have to run chown and chmod to change the ownership of these drives so all users can read and write to them. Gparted should ask you before partition a drive whether it is an external drive, and if it is, then make the partition available to all users, so no need to chown and chmod. Another option would be for gparted to allow users to set the ownership of the partition before formatting.
Directory permissions are not controlled by GParted. As you have discovered, if you wish a user to have write access to the top level mount point, you have to grant the appropriate permissions as shown in this tutorial: Mounting Linux Partitions in Ubuntu http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountlinux Since these permissions are granted on the mount point after the file system is mounted, these permissions disappear after unmounting the file system. If you wish to enable your users to have write access, and not have to re-grant the permissions each time you mount the file system, then one suggestion is to create directories on the file system after it is mounted. Then grant permissions on these lower level directories. These permissions will then survive the mount/umount process because these permissions are stored within the file system on the partition. For example the following commands demonstrate this method: sudo mkdir /mnt/testmnt sudo mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/testmnt cd /mnt/testmnt sudo mkdir dir-with-write-access chmod a+rwx dir-with-write-access cd dir-with-write-access touch deleteme.txt cd ~ sudo umount /mnt/testmnt sudo mount /mnt/testmnt cd /mnt/testmnt/dir-with-write-access touch deleteme2.txt If you wish a different method then I would suggest you try searching the internet for an alternate proposal. Marking this bug report as invalid because mount and read/write permissions are not a function of how GParted creates a file system.