Hard Drive install

[G a r y]

Hello,

I connected a new 3TB hard drive via usb. I formatted to ext4, created new partition, named it and clicked apply. I did it with both GParted and KDE Partition Manager.
In Dolphin the device is there, it is mounted. However, I can't do anything on that drive. I can't copy-paste items and there is a lost+found folder which I can't enter.

What's going on here?

[oshunluvr]

What's going on is a combo of permissions, ownership, and system defaults.

The "lost+found" folder on ext4 is root only access. You're not supposed to be able to access it unless you're root. Try opening a terminal and type "sudo ls -la " followed by the mount location and "/lost+found". There won't be anything in there at this point, and maybe never will. Personally, I think that folder should just be hidden, but I guess at least you can see how many files are in it at a glance. The number after the permissions are a count of the contents of the folder. A "2" actually means empty because every folder contains "." and ".."

You don't say how you mounted the drive, just clicked on it in Dolphin or did you mount it with the Partition Manager?

Dolphin will allow you to mount it, but since it's a "fixed" as in non-removable device, you will not be able to access it that way. The system defaults to read-only access for fixed devices. You need an entry in fstab if you want it mounted all the time.

With partition manager, if you select the partition and right-click on it, you should see "Edit mount point" as an option. This will allow you to create a basic mount entry in /etc/fstab without having to manually do it. Of course, you can also just hit Alt-F2 and enter "kate /etc/fstab" and create an fstab entry. Before you do that, make yourself a mount point.

To give your user access, before you mount it, set your user as the owner of the mount point. Then, in fstab include the option "user" and you will be able to access it freely. If you don't want it mounted at boot time, add the option "noauto" to fstab and it will mount when you click on it in dolphin, but not when you're booting up.

[mr_raider]

What I do for fixed storage is create a folder on the mounted partition using root access, then change ownership of the folder to my regular user. You can then create stuff below that folder since it belongs to you.

This way you don't give access to the whole mounted drive to your user.

[oshunluvr]

What I do for fixed storage is create a folder on the mounted partition using root access, then change ownership of the folder to my regular user. You can then create stuff below that folder since it belongs to you.

This way you don't give access to the whole mounted drive to your user.

Which is a good idea if you share you computer and the drive space with others. But if it's a solo user machine or a file system only for you, why bother with the extra layer? In my case, I share my desktop with the family, but I do all the backups and I don't want them in that file system so the whole drive belongs to me...

...because I'm the master!

[mr_raider]

...because I'm the master!

I may be may things, but I haven't been the master in a long, long time.

[oshunluvr]

I should have added: MMMMUUUUUAAAHAHAHAHA to that above post

[GreyGeek]

I’m the head of my family.

My my wife is the neck ...

[G a r y]

Thanks for the replies!
So what I did:
I gave it a folder in "media/user". I mounted it via KDE partition manager. Then opened terminal, entered root mode and then run this command:
chmod -R 777 /media/user/wdblue

And now it works fine. The only strange thing is that about 140GB is used on my new drive which is 3TB. What's that 140GB?

[oshunluvr]

By "used" space do you mean the total size doesn't add up to 3TB or df shows that much used?

Drives never have as much available space as they claim. Also, filesystem overhead (room for various journal metadata) will eat some space off the top.

One thing you can fix - EXT4 by default reserves 5% of drive space for critical daemon functions on a root file system. This will reveal how much is reserved (in blocks):

sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sdb1 | grep 'Reserved block count'

If you aren't installing an OS to this drive, you can make all this space available with:

sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdb1

Warning: Of course, use the device name of your drive in place of sdb1.