how do i make sure i have read and write access to the folder when i'm mounting it in Linux (Ubuntu) using the fstab file

Question

follow up to How do i set up shared folders in virtual box (windows 7 host, Ubuntu guest)?

i can get the folder to mount on start up, but it keeps coming up with a padlock symbol on the icon and i can't write to it

the linux machine is a virtual machine in a Mac OSX host using virtual box, i have made sure the shared folder in virtual box isn't set to read only

here's what i've got as my fstab file:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier
# for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name
# devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=f7ee2f9b-6d1d-4aae-84f0-d706fdd34e99 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=133ed8f3-c850-40bc-8dee-8f71d611c549 none            swap    sw              0       0
# mandy_share with baldrick
mandy_share /home/kirstin/Desktop/mandy_share vboxsf defaults 0 0 
# Baldrick's desktop copy of my Lab Book
Lab_Book_Uni /home/kirstin/Desktop/Lab_Book_Uni vboxsf defaults 0 0

Answer 1

Mount it manually, just to see if this works.

mkdir /media/somedir

umount /dev/sda(0-6) -- Whatever your partition is, just make sure it's un-mounted first.

then try: mount -t ntfs -o rw /dev/sda(0-6) /media/somedir

If it works great, if not you have other virtual box problems.

Answer 2

Most probably you want to set UID for your mount.

Try

mkdir /mnt/somedir
mount -o uid=YOUR_UID,rw /dev/sda(0-6) /mnt/somedir

Where YOUR_UID is your user id. You can get that by running

id

Output should be something like

uid=1000(myusername) gid=1000(myusername) [...]

where 1000 is your uid.

That way you'll own that mount, and you can write to there, if it's possible to mount that as rewritable (sometimes there is problems with for example corrupted filesystems).

You can put same options to fstab instead of "defaults"