Why Can’t I Change Permissions on My External Drive in Linux?

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Asked By CuriousCat42 On

I'm setting up a Media Server using my laptop and an external drive. After a while of struggling, I managed to mount the external drive to a folder in the '/media/' directory using the '/etc/fstab' method. However, I'm running into problems changing the permissions for this folder. I've tried using commands like chmod and chown but it just won't let me. My laptop's internal drive is formatted as ext4, while the external drive is formatted as exFAT. I'm using Linux Mint. Any ideas on what I can do?

2 Answers

Answered By LinuxWhizKid On

I had a similar problem, and surprisingly, just rebooting my system did the trick for me. If that doesn't work, check the fstab settings to see how permissions are assigned there, as they might not be set up correctly.

Answered By FileFormatGuru1 On

The issue you're facing is because exFAT doesn't support Unix-style permissions and ownership, which means you can't set them using `chmod` and `chown`. If you want more control over permissions, consider reformatting the drive to a different filesystem like ext4. Since you don't have much data on it yet, that might be your best option!

NoobLinuxUser -

Oh... Well if it's exFAT that's causing issues, should I reformat the drive to a different file system instead? (I don't have much on the drive yet and can easily back it up to my PC + I'm kinda a noob at Linux)

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