Arch Linux

Silent-Feathers

Member

Registered: 2025-12-07

Posts: 4

Unable to access hard drives

Hi!

I'm very new to the Linux world, and wanted to try using something very similar to the steam deck layout.
I've got everything working (KDE Plasma v6.5.3) except for read/write access to my two hard drives. Tracking the file path, it's blocked at /run/media/(USER) that only has root access.
Can I have some help getting access to the drives please? Both are wiped and formatted to btrfs, and are mounted to above path

Any help or suggestions are appreciated!

system72

Member

Registered: 2025-11-22

Posts: 542

Website

Re: Unable to access hard drives

you can either change the permissions of the mountpoint to be owned by your user or allow dolphin root access with kio-admin

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Silent-Feathers

Member

Registered: 2025-12-07

Posts: 4

Re: Unable to access hard drives

I did try to change the permissions but it almost instantly reverted back to root.
I also couldn't get kio-admin working either, for some reason. I might not have found the right info for that though.

What I ended up doing was creating directories in /mnt and installing KDE Partition Manager to change the mount point to those directories.

Thank you though! Seems like I was looking in the wrong area

system72

Member

Registered: 2025-11-22

Posts: 542

Website

Re: Unable to access hard drives

kio-admin works in conjunction with dolphin like this:

dolphin admin:///

Last edited by system72 (2025-12-07 09:52:52)

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Silent-Feathers

Member

Registered: 2025-12-07

Posts: 4

Re: Unable to access hard drives

Oh, good to know! I'll look into it next time.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,064

Re: Unable to access hard drives

You tried to change permissions how and they reset how exactly? On a BTRFS (POSIX compliant) filesystem permissions are stored per directory and per file, after the mount you'd do

#Adjust accordingly if your user doesn't have it's own group
sudo chown $USER:$USER /mnt/media #or whatever the root directory of your mountpoint is

File permissions are an important concept to understand, maybe peruse https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_p … attributes for a primer.

Silent-Feathers

Member

Registered: 2025-12-07

Posts: 4

Re: Unable to access hard drives

I think what happened is that I was trying to change permissions of a folder where the folder above was also root. Everything is fixed though