[PLUG] Chown and chmod not solving a permissions problem

alan at clueserver.org alan at clueserver.org
Wed Sep 11 23:27:31 UTC 2019


Have you tried using fsck on the partition?

> I have had a 256GB PNY USB stick for quite a while now, and it used to
> work just fine. When I bought it I removed the FAT32 partition that PNY
> put on it and created a new one, and formatted it to Ext4. I did this
> because I frequently have files over 4GB in size.
>
> Recently the computer locked up (no mouse, no keyboard) so I had to hit
> the power switch. The PNY drive was mounted at the time, and it
> remained plugged in when I rebooted. But after rebooting I discovered
> that it was owned by root. I'm still scratching my head over how that
> happened, but I solved the problem with 'sudo chown
> jjj:jjj /media/jjj/256GB-2.' (When I created and formatted the Ext4
> partition with gparted I gave it the label 256GB-2.)
>
> Later I discovered that every time I unplugged it and then plugged it
> back in again it was once again owned by root. Usually it
> is /dev/sdd,so I also tried to chown /dev/sdd, but that hasn't helped,
> nor has 'sudo chmod 777 /dev/sdd' or 'chmod 777 /media/jjj/256GB-2.
>
> Earlier today the hard drive light began flashing continuously, and
> eventually I discovered that the culprit was a program that had finished
> the task that I had used it for, but which I hadn't shut down. I closed
> it and the hard drive light stopped flashing, yet I began experiencing
> strange behavior by the GUI file manage (Thunar), as well as the ls
> command. After fiddling with things for an hour without success I
> decided to just reboot. Before doing so I backed up all the files to my
> Mediasonic external drive, then removed the 256GB drive. On
> rebooting the GUI did not come up, but the keyboard was working, so I
> opened a command shell, which came up as root. I gave it the command
> 'reboot,' which worked and this time the GUI came up normally.
>
> I poked at things and the file system seemed to be working normally
> again, so I plugged in the 256GB drive, and it failed to come up in
> Thunar, even though its light flickered as it always does when it is
> plugged in. It was also not visible with the ls command or with mount. I
> spent nearly half an hour muttering vile words, and then suddenly it
> appeared. Quickly checking, it appears that all the files are intact and
> owned by me.
>
> For the record, the computer is my laptop which is pushing six years
> old, and on which the OS is Xubuntu 16.04, up to date. It has two
> internal SSDs: /dev/sdb (512GB) which holds / and /home, and /dev/sda,
> which is a 1TB SSD, for data storage, but mostly empty. The SMART tool
> says both are OK.
>
> I read the man pages for chown and chmod, but I suspect that I don't
> understand them thoroughly. It perplexes me that this USB stick isn't
> working like it used to.
>
> Thoughts and suggestions welcome.
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