[SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 04:19:41

Hi guys,

[Solved bit]

Been googling in circles and tearing my hair own over this stuff for sufficient time to warrant actually asking for help (a place I rarely end up in due to the wonderful Wiki and Google-foo)

I'm having some really odd mounting issues with two external drives. Both are formatted ext4, permissions and ownerships are all correct, yet I cannot access the drives as a normal user.

They mount fine (I've tried mounting in multiple different ways as my user - from nautilus, dolphin and space filemanagers, and using pmount and udevil from the command line), but I cannot open any folders in any file managers (even ranger), I just get a pop-up saying "you don't have the correct permissions to view the contents of foo" - yet I'm the owner, the group is users and the permissions are 660 (and I can't chmod without sudo even though I'm the owner!).

Ok, so I just tried 777 and it does work and I have full access. But surely that's not right? I shouldn't need execute permissions to read and write to a drive - by definition! WTF?!

[Unsolved bit]

The other bizarre issue surrounding this, is that after I eject a device (either graphically or via sudo umount), and have verified via lsblk that it's no longer mounted) - it remains displayed in all my file managers and errors out when I click on it (duh!).

What on earth is going on here? I feel like I'm going mad! It's probably something absurdly obvious, but I'm going round in circles here...

I'd very much appreciate any insight anyone could provide, even if does result in a revealing me to total idiot! (it wouldn't be the first time!) :-)

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 06:52:15)

ewaller · 2013-02-25 05:21:54

knowayhack wrote:

...
Ok, so I just tried 777 and it does work and I have full access. But surely that's not right? I shouldn't need execute permissions to read and write to a drive - by definition! WTF?! The other bizarre issue surrounding this, is that after I eject a device (either graphically or via sudo umount), and have verified via lsblk that it's no longer mounted) - it remains displayed in all my file managers and errors out when I click on it (duh!).
What on earth is going on here? I feel like I'm going mad! It's probably something absurdly obvious, but I'm going round in circles here...
I'd very much any insight anyone could provide, even if does result in a revealing me to total idiot! (it wouldn't be the first time!) :-)

Well...
You do need -x to be allowed to 'see' into the directory and view its contents

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions … -be-opened

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 05:36:52

Yup - as I suspected - full-on facepalm - feeling pretty darn silly now! Many, many thanks though. Gotta learn somehow, even if it is super slowly and embarrassingly! :-)

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 06:31:39)

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 06:18:18

Ok, so I'm afraid the file manager thing is still not solved - obviously that was a separate issue...

Heres the message when I click on the drive that is no longer there:

Error mounting /dev/sdc1 at /run/media/toby/asus: Command-line `mount -t "ext4" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/sdc1" "/run/media/toby/asus"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

dmesg tail gives me:

[16765.967370] cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 00 00 08 02 00 00 02 00
[16765.967389] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 2050
[16765.967468] EXT4-fs (sdc1): unable to read superblock
[16879.565843] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled error code
[16879.565854] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc]
[16879.565858] Result: hostbyte=0x07 driverbyte=0x00
[16879.565863] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB:
[16879.565866] cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 00 00 08 02 00 00 02 00
[16879.565885] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 2050
[16879.565962] EXT4-fs (sdc1): unable to read superblock

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 06:24:34)

jasonwryan · 2013-02-25 06:23:00

Automounting is handled through an active login session. If that is working correctly, the only other thing you need do is setup something to mount the drives, see the wiki for details.

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 06:28:37

It happens (or rather doesn't) regardless of how or by whom the drive is mounted or unmounted. Or perhaps I've misunderstood what your saying...

The issue is that the drive shows as still present in the GUI file managers after it's been unmounted and physically removed. Also it happens across three seperate FMs and in Gnome, KDE, Awesome and Openbox.

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 06:29:23)

jasonwryan · 2013-02-25 06:55:16

knowayhack wrote:

[16765.967389] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 2050
[16765.967468] EXT4-fs (sdc1): unable to read superblock

This is your issue. Have you attempted to repartition the drive or done anything else that might have damaged it?
You can try and recover it with fsck.

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 07:05:37

No (well yes! but you'll see what I mean...!) - in fact during this whole debarkle I even went to the lengths of dding both drives (mbr an'all) then reformatting with the read check flag on mkfs.ext4 and it reported no bad blocks... I then rsynced all my files back over. Perhaps the original files are somehow corrupted as I had the same issue both before and after the reformat/re-rsync...??

However, another baffling factor - this happens on two separate ext4 formatted drives with the same files and folders, yet on the ntfs drive that the files came from everything works exactly as normal...which would suggest it's not the files..

Could both drives be bad and yet not report bad blocks on a mkfs.ext4 -c ?

p.s. Surely those error messages can't be reporting the state of the drive anyway seeing as it's no longer even physically attached to the computer? Aren't they just saying (to effect) "I can't find the block I look for that has the information I need to mount the drive" - which is what you'd expect as the file manager is sending the command to mount a non-existent device ?

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 07:17:08)

jasonwryan · 2013-02-25 07:29:49

You posted that output as being dmesg; I would still fsck the drives, particularly if the ntfs drive does mount correctly.

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 08:21:02

fsck on all drives returns clean.

I don't mean to be rude, and it's probably that I'm just not explaining my situation well enough (probably I shouldn't have posted the error outputs, as they are most likely irrelevant), but I get the impression that your not really following what I'm saying - at no point have I mentioned that any of the drives don't mount or have issues with mounting (even when I was having the [solved] permissions issues), and I'm actually having no troubles whatsoever with the ntfs drive.

It's that after the drives have been unmounted and physically removed, they do not disappear graphically from the file managers.

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 08:27:52)

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 08:29:21

My apologies - I just noticed that I totally misread what you said! You said "does mount" - I read "doesn't mount" for some reason! Talk about pot calling the kettle black! Methinks I probably need to sleep... :-P

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 08:30:57)

jasonwryan · 2013-02-25 08:30:32

So, to be clear: the drives mount, you can read/write to them, the only issue is that--after unmounting--the icon remains in the file manager?

Yes, this thread, from the title down, is quite hard to follow.

I have no idea about the icon thing, it may be related to how you unmount the drive, but that is just a guess. Using udiskie and pcmanfm, the icons disappear for me once the drive is successfully unmounted.

knowayhack · 2013-02-25 08:37:26

Yeah, sorry - I've made it a wee bit convoluted! I had two separate issues that I mistakenly assumed were linked because they both involved external ext4 usb drives, although one simply turned out to be a fundamental misunderstanding of unix directory permissions on my part. Though, to be fair, I have quite clearly marked the solved bit from the unsolved bit in both the title and first post..

I'm afraid I've tried numerous umounting methods - graphically from Dolphin, Nautilus and SpaceFM and pumount and sudo umount from the cli. Always the drives remain displayed in all gui fms (although they disappear from the mount point in /run/media/user), yet the ntfs drive disappears as expected. This behaviour is persistent across log-outs and reboots...

Totally bizarre.

Last edited by knowayhack (2013-02-25 09:13:06)

Arch Linux

#1 2013-02-25 04:19:41

[SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#2 2013-02-25 05:21:54

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#3 2013-02-25 05:36:52

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#4 2013-02-25 06:18:18

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#5 2013-02-25 06:23:00

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#6 2013-02-25 06:28:37

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#7 2013-02-25 06:55:16

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#8 2013-02-25 07:05:37

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#9 2013-02-25 07:29:49

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#10 2013-02-25 08:21:02

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#11 2013-02-25 08:29:21

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#12 2013-02-25 08:30:32

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

#13 2013-02-25 08:37:26

Re: [SOLVED] Permissions [UNSOLVED] & File manager madness...

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