[CONFIGURATION] Upload and download to non boot drives/partitions errors

[robhill1965]

Hello,

I'm not a "brand newbie". I've been running dual boot linux and windows for about 8 years now, but I always struggle when something weird happens. I usually give up and reinstall. That won't work this time.

I recently built a new computer and installed Kubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10 to an onboard NVME ssd. I have a second NVME ssd on the motherboard and then 3 more drives attached to the sata ports. One 2.5 inch ssd, and two 3.5 inch spinning drives.

My problem:
I can access all 5 drives. I can read and write to all 5 drives, but I can't upload or download to any drives except my boot drive on the Linux partition. When I try to download to the second NVME drive, it doesn't show up anywhere even if I try browsing to it through file structure and into the "media" folder.
The other 3 drives, I get an error "could not read contents" and "error opening drive" and then "permission denied" all in one little pop up window. If I try to upload same issue, same errors. I have to upload and download to the boot drive Linux partition, and then I can copy past from there to any of the other drives/partitions.
Since have access to all drives to read and write, I can't see this being a user permissions issue but who knows? Maybe I used "sudo" once to often and locked myself partially out of the required permissions to upload and download?? I've never had this issue before.

[jlittle]

(By "access" I presume you mean using dolphin, KDE's file manager.) It sounds to me like your extra drives are not mounted at startup or login. Dolphin will mount them if you click on them on its devices panel, but your browser (which I presume is the way you download) is not.

To mount them at startup, you could put them in /etc/fstab, but it's easy to break a system that way. To mount them at login, go to system settings, removable storage, removable devices, and click automount at login.

[jlittle]

Continued, some relevant points:

• yes, "Removable" is a misnomer, though that's a vague concept these days
• another solution to your problem and a good idea anyway, if I understand it, is to use the dolphin dialogue in firefox, by setting GTK_USE_PORTAL to 1: add the line export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 near the top of your $HOME/.bashrc
• having meaningful labels on your partitions is a boon, IMO; you can set them using the partition manager
• I presume you've turned off fast boot in Windows; if you haven't you won't have write access to the NTFS partitions

[Don B. Cilly]

I just tried that export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 thing.
Absolutely brilliant. It works for everything... that I tried.

No more (I hope ;·) silly open file dialogues - that take ages to get to non-obvious places, don't show hidden files without acrobatics... brilliant

[robhill1965]

I understand what you're saying, but after I click on the drives, that would mount them, and I should then be able to upload or download to them..., but it makes no difference. It really seems like it's partially a permissions issue, but I'm not experienced enough to address it.
As far as auto mounting in the settings, I've already done that. Made no difference. I'm not sure that addresses drives connected to the mobo or sata ports. I would think that setting applies to removable storage through the I/O panel, usb ports etc.

Isn't there a terminal command I can use..., something like chmod, I've seen to reapply the correct ownership for files/drives? I've seen and used it before from other forums when I think I used the "sudo" command in the wrong way, and it fixed it. Just throwing that out there.

[robhill1965]

Continued, some relevant points:

• yes, "Removable" is a misnomer, though that's a vague concept these days
• another solution to your problem and a good idea anyway, if I understand it, is to use the dolphin dialogue in firefox, by setting GTK_USE_PORTAL to 1: add the line export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 near the top of your $HOME/.bashrc
• having meaningful labels on your partitions is a boon, IMO; you can set them using the partition manager
• I presume you've turned off fast boot in Windows; if you haven't you won't have write access to the NTFS partitions

I have the issue with chromium and Firefox, so I'm not sure your very confusing PORTAL suggestion will solve my problem.

I'll try the disabling fast boot, but I really don't care about accessing the windows partition while in linux, so that won't solve my problem. I just included that piece of info of me not being able to upload or download to the windows partition to give a complete picture.

I'm more interested in accessing my other drives..., mostly the 2nd 2 TB onboard NVME drive that I use to store everything.

I have a spinning 4 TB that I use for backup, so it's not a huge issue there.
I have a small 120 GB ssd I'm going to use for cloning my entire boot drive, so again, not a huge issue.
Lastly, I have a 1 TB spinning drive that's just an extra drive.

I have already labeled all the drives/partitions
(Kubuntu, Win10, NVME2TB, 4TBstore, 1TBstore, and 120GBstore)

[robhill1965]

I just tried that export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 thing.
Absolutely brilliant. It works for everything... that I tried.

No more (I hope ;·) silly open file dialogues - that take ages to get to non-obvious places, don't show hidden files without acrobatics... brilliant

I couldn't understand what he was trying to explain here. Can you give me a step by step on how to do this? Did it fix any issues with chromium as well??

[Don B. Cilly]

add the line
export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1
near the top of your $HOME/.bashrc

Is the instruction.
To step-by-step it... in your ~ (home) directory you have a file called .bashrc. Edit it.
If you can't see it, tell Dolphin (or whatever) to Show hidden files. Usually toggled with Alt-. (dot). As it's got a dot at the beginning, it's hidden...
If you still can't find it, try kate .bashrc :·)
Near the top, means that. Say... after the first esac. It doesn't really matter, as long as it's on a line by itself.
To have the changes take effect, press F4 (in either Dolphin or Kate, which will bring up a small terminal window) and type
source .bashrc

[jlittle]

... after I click on the drives, that would mount them, and I should then be able to upload or download to them..., but it makes no difference.

I agree. In dolphin, after you mount the drives, can you write to them in dolphin? Say, by right-clicking, does the pop-up menu include a "Create New" option?

Isn't there a terminal command I can use..., something like chmod.

Probably, but it's a good idea to identify what's wrong first. Too often, I've made a mess blindly applying chmod or chown.

Firstly, do you get

when you attempt the download?

Anyway, to answer your question directly, assuming a drive has a Linux filesystem on it, please, in a konsole, cd to the directory that you'd like to download to, and run

ls -ld

If you get something like

drwxrwxr-x 28 root root 4096 Jun 13 14:02 .

then I suggest creating a directory there for downloads using sudo, then changing its ownership to your user:

sudo mkdir downloads
sudo chown $USER downloads

but you could use

sudo chmod go+rwx .

If a drive has an NTFS or FAT32 filesystem, which would be necessary for Windows to be able to write to it, the permission and ownership is determined at mount time, and using chmod or chown is ineffective. Normally they are mounted in /media/$USER/ with the owner being $USER and the permissions are 755, or rwxw-xr-x.