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This may seem like a stupid question, but with most Linux stuff, it seems to me that a lot of trivial things are not documented.

Anyway, I want to simply mount an ext4 file-system onto a normal mount point in Ubuntu (/media/whereever), as read-writable for the current logged-in user, i.e. me.

I don't want to add anything into /etc/fstab, I just want to do it now, manually. I need super-user privileges to mount a device, but then only root can read-write that mount. I've tried various of the mount options, added it into fstab, but with no luck.

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  • Is there a reason why you don't want to mount it somewhere within your home directory? Oct 6, 2010 at 19:14

4 Answers 4

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On an ext4 filesystem (like ext2, ext3, and most other unix-originating filesystems), the effective file permissions don't depend on who mounted the filesystem or on mount options, only on the metadata stored within the filesystem.

With Ubuntu, mounting should happen automatically when you insert the disk, or you should be able to click on an icon to mount. You can also install pmount to mount filesystems as an ordinary user from the command line.

If you have a removable filesystem that uses different user IDs from your system, you can use bindfs (in the Ubuntu package of the same name) to provide a view of any filesystem with different ownership or permissions. The removable filesystem must be mounted already, e.g. on /media/disk9; then, if you want to appear as the owner of all files, you can run

mkdir ~/disk9
sudo bindfs -u $(id -u) -g $(id -g) /media/disk9 ~/disk9
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  • Thanks! This worked for me with ext3. Note that I had to first mount the ext3 filesystem into some mount directory, then mount that directory with bindfs into the final directory. Jun 9, 2011 at 12:19
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You can use:

mount -o user /dev/devicename and user option in your fstab.

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If you're not in the mood to hand-edit your /etc/fstab file, I'd suggest trying out PySDM to define the rules for mounting your ext4 file system on a regular basis. It can be installed by installing the "pysdm" package in Synaptic, or by searching the Ubuntu Software Center for "pysdm". Once installed, it is available under the System --> Administration --> Storage Device Manager..

PySDM in action

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Just realised after reading last comment at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2142284 that all one has to do is a sudo chown -Rvf <user>:<group> <mountpoint>

This is all that is required ...

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  • 5
    This is a destructive operation. If you do it before mounting, it won't make any difference to file ownership on the mounted drive; if you do it after mounting then it will overwrite all of the permissions. If the drive contains a Linux installation, changing permissions like this will make it unbootable after you unmount it.
    – Warbo
    Apr 12, 2018 at 9:14

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