How to solve some permission problems on your NTFS, FAT partitions, etc.

The best way to explain this problem is through its symptoms. Has it ever happened to you that it doesn't let you trash files specifically deleted on one of your partitions (generally an NTFS or FAT)? You may have trouble unzipping TAR files, getting the unintuitive message: "cannot utime: Operation not permitted". Well, in essence the problem is the same: the assignment of permissions when mounting your partitions is wrong.

Our reader Gustavo Kirch wrote to us asking for help with a problem that I imagine several of you must suffer: not being able to send deleted files from an NTFS or FAT partition to the trash. The strange thing about this behavior is that it does allow the user to permanently delete the file (via Shift + Del) but not send it to the trash (Del). Strange, right?

Gustavo also complained about not being able to unzip TAR files on those partitions (only TAR or TAR.something, for example TAR.GZ, TAR.BZ2, etc.). The strange thing about all this is that if he copied the TAR file to the desktop or to any other path stored in his EXT partition, everything was fine. It was possible to unzip it and do whatever it takes with it. Rarer still was the fact that on its NTFS or FAT partition it could unzip other formats (ZIP, RAR, etc.) without any problems. The error obtained in the case of TARs was quite cryptic: "cannot utime: Operation not permitted".

Actually, the cause of both problems is only one: a bad assignment of permissions of the partition in question.

To fix them, I opened a terminal and typed:

sudo gedit / etc / fstab

The first thing you have to do is detect the line in which the mounting of the problematic partition is set. It could be, for example:

# / windows was on / dev / sda1 during installation

UUID = 572C8DDF568B4261 / windows ntfs defaults, uid = 1000, gid = 1000, noatime 0 0

The UUID is the unique identification number of each partition. It could also say something like / dev / sda1 or similar (indicating the path of the device). What follows is the path where to mount that partition. In this case / windows. The rest are the parameters that indicate the type of partition (ntfs, fat, ext3, etxt4, etc.) and the permissions (that determine who has access to that partition and under what conditions - read only, read and write, etc. ), among other things.

The solution consists simply in adding to the line of your problematic partition the part that says uid = 1000 and gui = 1000. What this means is that User (User ID = uid) 1000 and group (Group ID = gid) 1000 will be the "owners" of that partition. The uid and gid 1000 generally correspond to the main user of the machine. To see your uid and gid go to System> Administration> Users and groups. Then click the button Manage groups, find your username and click the button Properties. To do it directly from the terminal I wrote:

id

It is also important that you delete any mask parameter (umask, dmask, fmask) that has that line and replace it with defaults, unless you know exactly why you want to quit. These parameters fine-tune the permission policy (who can execute, read, modify, or create files) for that partition.

In conclusion, If you want you can copy-paste everything that follows the word ntfs in the previous example and copy it in your / etc / fstab in the corresponding place.

I am leaving some things out, but roughly that is what should be done. To really learn how to handle / etc / fstab settings, you would need a post entirely dedicated to it (which I will surely write in the future).