Thought its about time to "clean" my system and start clean afresh , so reinsatlled the latest nav 0.5 (across one big partition). I then use disk partition to split the drive to two partitions, so I can use one for data only. I cannot access the 2nd partition I created, keep getting permission denied. I am sure I did it once before long time ago and did not have this issue. What to do next?

Ken

Can you run in terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T to open a terminal window) and post the output back to this thread?

Hi Marcus,
the following:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 136GB 136GB primary ext4 boot
3 136GB 140GB 4366MB primary linux-swap(v1)
4 140GB 318GB 178GB primary ext4
2 318GB 320GB 2008MB extended




OK I know it seems strange with the partition I created is primary partition, but thats all I can create, the logical & extended are greyed out whe.
n I tried to create the new partition.
Thanks,
Ken

Hi Ken,

this will probably require higher powers (read: Moe) than my very limited ones... in the meantime here's what comes to my mind:

[1] You have probably already tried this, but just in case: When running from a live system/usb stick can you mount/unmount your new partition (#4 I assume) under GParted's "Partition" menu?

[2] If no to [1]: Can you have GParted run a check on that partition (also under Partition menu in GParted)?

[3] Primary vs extended partition: not necessarily odd in itself; "traditional" hard disks allow a maximum of 4 partitions. The extended partition is simply a workaround to get past that limit, by allowing to have more "logical partitions" under the extended one. The fact that it was grayed out though in GParted does seem a bit odd. Assuming you have no data in your extended partition, can you run GParted from a live system/usb stick and delete the extended partition (only 2GB anyway)? Then see if that changes anything about accessibility of your new partition.

[4] To allow Moe to wield his full diagnostic powers it might be helpful to post the output to the following commands back t this thread (while running from your hard disk rather than the live system):
(lists logical names for the partitions)
(UUID identifiers for partitions)
(what's currently mounted)
(what your system tries to mount when starting up)

Hi Markus,
Did what you said in [3]; and try reformated the partition as FAT 32; now I can read & write to it! I guess only disadvantage is FAT 32 max file size og 4g.



Thanks,
Ken

Another disadvantage of FAT32 is that it does not support unix-type file ownership and permission attributes. Not such a big deal on single user system but occasionally it can have annoying side effects (like double-clicking on a file to open it in an editor and the file manager trying to "run" the file instead because it assumes the 'executable' bit is set). You could try reformatting it back to ext4 which *should* work as well now.

Tried reformat it to ext4; cannot access the partition again permission error, so must be some setting of permission thingy. Any for the time being I reformated back to FAT 32 at least I can store & retrive data in it. Another computer thingy i do not understand.
Cheers,
Ken

You are not alone:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/175149/h ... yntax?rq=1

http://askubuntu.com/questions/153801/p ... chine?rq=1

It happened to me too. The way I understood it was that the partition is formatetd by some user (default install user, root or who knows who) and thus is not owned by you.

Probably the easiest way to do this is to go above the directory where the drive is mounted in. Most likely this is /media/'username'. There should be one folder called data - this should be the partition in question. Right click on it, go to properties -> permissions and get ownership of the partition. If PCmanFM doesn't allow that (I'm currently using Xubuntu) then open a terminal in /media/username and use the chown command to get ownership of the partition:

sudo chown -R username:username /media/username/data

Done.

Don't use FAT- it's really old, has the 4 GB filesize limit and doesn't do journaling, which means it is not protected against certain data loss cenarios etc. The reason it works in your case is, that it does not have the ability to deal with file permission at all.

If you wanted to separate your 'data' from the rest of the system it probably would have been cleaner to define a dedicated /home partition at the time of installation. She system- partition (/) doesn't need to be bigger than 30- 40 GB. Swap about 2 Gigs (depending on the amount of RAM you have). The rest could be your /home- partition which is very much like your USER folder in Windows.

HTH,
Christian

As zenfunk pointed out the only good thing about FAT32 is that WindowsOS can read it. If you don't need that compatibility don't use it.

There are 3 reason you can't partition or format a drive/device

• the device is mounted
• you're not root
• there's a mismatch between the command and the device (typo, or just wrong)

The drive in question seems to be an internal drive without a windows install, so a windows readable filesystem is not needed IMHO. Even with a dual boot with windows one could always use the windows partition itself to transfer files because Linux can write to it directly. No FAT needed.

HTH,
Christian