Kubuntu is not doing what I tell it to

Recently my M.2 with Win10 on it decided to die on me (as in, the BIOS doesn’t even see it anymore). I bought a new one (and a new HDD) and have tonight installed Kubuntu on it and got to formatting my my new drive.

I expected some trouble getting everything converted to Linux file-systems, but I didn’t expect it to outright refuse to do things I tell it to. The new drive successfully formatted as ext4 as I assumed that’d probably be best for installing games with via Lutris/Steam+Proton, etc. The drive will not, however, change ownership or permission regardless of what command I throw at it. I can not write to it at all. My movie/shows drive I can read from, but not write to, and it will also not change ownership or permissions when hit with chmod/chown commands or anything else I’ve tried.

Another thing that is really infuriating me is that my task manager widget clusters are ignoring what monitor they are on. They are set to only show active programs on the screen that the icons themselves are on. They are doing the opposite. Screenshot included. I’m sure I have about a dozen other things I will need help with but I haven’t even gotten that far because I can’t get anything installed.

If anyone has any ideas of what might be going on, any help would be appreciated. Oh, and it’d be best if you pretended you’re talking to an idiot who knows next to nothing about Linux. In fact, don’t pretend.

That happens if it’s mounted read only. (I presume you’ve tried using sudo; if not, please tell us what you have tried.)

I’ve tried sudo chown/chmod/etc. For whatever reason, it would only mount as read only no matter what I did.

Considering I had a mirrored/backup drive for each of my main drives, I decided to get risky and try a number of things, including varying partitions and filesystems. I don’t remember how, but I finally got the new 2TB drive for fresh game installs to change over in the command line. I think it might have something to do with using a different mount point or varying the pathway in the console when trying to turn it. Whatever the case, I got it to work. My movie drive still wouldn’t work, however, so I threw my hands up, reformatted one of them to NTSF (so I could still share with Windows), and copied everything over. It took 6 hours to transfer 1 way but the problem is solved now.

That being said, if you know a program like Syncback (Win program) that’s for Linux, please let me know. Syncback allowed me to make a pure mirror of one drive onto another and when I ran the program, it would check things to make sure they’re all the same and delete/copy/move as needed. I need something like that for Linux. Specifically, I do NOT want an archiving/compressing program. Just something that works like Syncback. Thanks in advance.

The issue with the the desktop panels being backwards went away when I relogged. Same for the problem of rotating wallpapers not working on one screen. But it sometimes comes back. Idk what caused it, but at least it goes away if I relog

rsync is the most common program to mirror a directory from one location to another.

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Your issue had to deal with the mount point that was supplied for the disk. You either need to edit your fstab (add a mask) to fix that in the future or make sure the Mount point is open to a group that your users belong to with read, write, and execute bits.

Could you elaborate on that? To make sure this is the case, here’s a screenshot of what I’m seeing. It’s set to me being able to view and modify, but I can’t delete anything or create new files/folders there or move things there. if I try to do “apply changes to all…” I get an error

Open a terminal in that directory and do an ls -al ../ and an ls -al ./

Post it here.

ls -al …/
total 20
drwxr-x—+ 5 root root 4096 May 25 02:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 May 21 23:34 …
drwxrwxrwx 13 root root 4096 May 22 14:32 Cesspool
drwxrwxrwx 6 rose rose 4096 May 23 00:01 Linux_Gaming
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 4096 May 11 21:24 ‘Movie & Video’

ls -al ./
total 32
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 4096 May 11 21:24 .
drwxr-x—+ 5 root root 4096 May 25 02:58 …
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 4096 Apr 18 2020 ‘$RECYCLE.BIN’
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 16384 Feb 15 05:29 Movies
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 0 Aug 4 2018 msdownld.tmp
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 4096 May 18 01:55 Shows
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 0 Dec 13 23:39 ‘System Volume Information’
drwxrwxrwx 1 rose rose 0 Sep 28 2013 Utility

Well eff. That looks right. how are you mounting this directory? Do you have an entry in your fstab? Is this NTFS formatted now?

**Edit
The file size of the Movies folder looks really off.

No because it’s showing the size of the inode, which is (usually) 4096 bytes (or more) for directories (smallest block-size on a drive). It doesn’t show the size of what’s in it.

Same for root (here Fedora):

[tarulia@localhost]~% ls -l /
total 3556
lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root       7 Jul 27  2020 bin -> usr/bin
dr-xr-xr-x.   7 root root    4096 May 24 09:15 boot <<<<<<<
drwxr-xr-x.  23 root root    4820 May 25 04:53 dev
drwxr-xr-x. 179 root root   12288 May 25 15:00 etc
drwxr-xr-x.   5 root root    4096 Apr 13 18:30 home <<<<<<<
lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root       7 Jul 27  2020 lib -> usr/lib
lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root       9 Jul 27  2020 lib64 -> usr/lib64
drwx------.   2 root root   16384 Apr 25  2018 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x.   3 root root    4096 Feb  8 17:18 media <<<<<<<
drwxr-xr-x.   2 root root    4096 Jul 27  2020 mnt <<<<<<<
drwxr-xr-x.   4 root root    4096 Jul 27  2020 opt <<<<<<<
dr-xr-xr-x. 476 root root       0 May 24 20:25 proc
dr-xr-x---.   9 root root    4096 Apr 29 15:14 root <<<<<<<
drwxr-xr-x.  49 root root    1340 May 25 14:13 run
lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root       8 Jul 27  2020 sbin -> usr/sbin
drwxr-xr-x.   2 root root    4096 Jul 27  2020 srv <<<<<<<
dr-xr-xr-x.  13 root root       0 May 24 20:25 sys
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root 3574056 Oct 11  2019 @System.solv
drwxrwxrwt.  31 root root     720 May 25 17:01 tmp
drwxr-xr-x.  13 root root    4096 Nov  8  2020 usr <<<<<<<
drwxr-xr-x.  20 root root    4096 Nov  8  2020 var <<<<<<<

Based on the octal permissions it looks like he just ripped his external drive from windows to his linux box.

If the partition is formatted with NTFS then it is possible that it is ‘dirty’ as windows does shady stuff sometimes.

There is a command the OP can do to clean the 'drive.

sudo ntfsfix /dev/sde1
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This is exactly the case. My movie drive and it’s backup were just NTSF formats with the folders created on the root level and files dumped directly into them. Nothing is or has ever been “installed” on these drives. Just files. That’s why I thought this was so weird that it wouldn’t work.

Readout of using hte command you listed:
Mounting volume… The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors…
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr…
Reading $MFT… OK
Reading $MFTMirr… OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT… OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition… OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)… OK
Checking the alternate boot sector… OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdb2 was processed successfully.

Still cannot write to drive.

In your example, you posted /dev/sde1 as your external drive. This output indicates you did a different drive.

Also, a quick primer on what drive letters mean.

/dev/sdXY

X is the physical drive and Y is the partition.

So if you have a drive plugged into the second SATA port on your mobo it would appear as /dev/sdb and the primary partition on that drive would be /dev/sdb1.

There were 2 drives that were giving me problems. sde1 was the new, 2TB HDD that I bought and formatted as a library for Steam/Lutris for anything I could get Linux to run. This drive initially did refuse to change permissions, but I got it to work (don’t remember how exactly). sdb2 is the drive/partition of my movies/shows storage that is STILL not changing permissions.

And thank you for the explanation. That is actually extremely helpful. In fact, it might help explain what’s going on because it made me pay attention to a detail that I had, up till now, though irrelevent.

There are 3 partitions on that drive. The second and biggest (at 99.999% of the drive capacity) is sbd2, formatted as ntfs, as desired. The third is a tiny 1.13MB of unallocated space that… is there for some reason. It’s 1.13MB, whatever. The first partition, however, is 128MB of “unkown” file-system type labeled as “Microsoft reserved partition.” Now… seeing as how I never installed anything on that drive and have never done ANYTHING on that drive other than write and read video file data to and from it… yeah I don’t know what that’s doing there.

EDIT: you might want to check out my Linux Plunge blogpost here. I plan on going all the way and having your insight would be appreciated when I come up with new stuff I need to learn how to do.

That can be a recovery partition. Windows sometimes puts them on secondary drives as a sort-of backup solution when something with the first drive goes wrong. It’s not really anything to worry about.
But of course you have to adjust your ntsf-fix appropriately, you’d need to use sdb2 as the partition to use it on then.
edit:
nevermind, I can’t read, you used sdb2 :facepalm: mybad.

How’s the drive mounted? What is your /etc/fstab saying?

HAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA… I hate it…

It’s a text-file :slight_smile:

So either cat /etc/fstab or vi /etc/fstab if you wanna edit it.

Oh. Yeah Idk what you were referring to exactly. This is what it says if I include cat

image

that’s just stuff about my M.2 drive though. That isn’t what you wanted, right?

Well, sort of.

With no configuration in fstab NTFS drives are usually mounted read-only by default, so adjusting ownership won’t do you anything.

You’ll have to mount it read-write to be able to change ownerships (since that is also writing), and then actually change stuff on it.

What did the chown say when you tried it by the way? And what does it say now after the ntsf-fix?

So you’ll have to make an entry in there (backup the file first) to tell the OS to mount it read-write.
I don’t have an entry for my NTFS drives in there because mine happened to be read-write from the start (I don’t know why, and I didn’t care enough to find out), but there’s a couple tutorials how to do this.

What’s weird is that the permissions tab already says I (as individual and as group) own the drive. That’s what makes no sense to me. And I don’t know enough about mounting and the use of fstab to figure that out.