Hello,

I have a 2nd internal HDD for data only. This HDD is connected via SATA, hence the system detects it as an internal drive. Indeed, it shows up as expected as an unmounted drive in the Devices List on the left panel in the file manager Dolphin.

The goal is to mount / unmount that HDD not automatically on boot, but manually via Dolphin whenever it is needed.

Therefore, I made an entry in fstab for that HDD with its UUID, the desired mountpoint "/mnt/Data", ext4, and parameters "defaults,noauto,noatime,users". Moreover, I changed the ownership of the mountpoint to the standard user by "chown <user> /mnt/Data" and set the permissions accordingly by "chmod u+rwx,go+r -R /mnt/Data".

However, when I click on that HDD in the devices List on the left panel in the file manager Dolphin, it asks for root privileges.

Please, what shall I do to get that HDD mounted as normal user?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

Oli

Hello again,

in the meantime, I got this working solution from another forum:

The policykit configuration file had to be modified. In file /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.udisks2.policy the wording in line 163 had to be changed from "auth_admin_keep" to "yes".

I wonder how an "average user" shall know that solution? And heaven knows, if it will survive any updates, cf. https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/PolicyKit.

Regards,

Oli

You forgot two important mount options in your filesytem table (fstab).
uid and gid.

[Edit]
This is wrong, the OP uses file system ext4, which doesn't allow uid and gid as a mount option.


On terminal, type 'id' to get your uid and gid.
then add them to the fstab, for example uid=1000,gid=1000

If you want to test this first, mount your device manually to a new folder.

for example:
sudo mount -t vfat -o user,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000 /dev/your_device /mountpoint

(vfat = fat32)

[Edit]
I should add, mounting for a specific user does not work with all file systems!
For example, you can do this for Windows filesystems like ntfs or fat32, but not on Linux file systems like ext4.

I also have an internal ext4 partition which is not automatically mounted on startup.
When mounted, the mountpoint belongs to root, but all the data of the hdd lies in a subfolder "data".
And this subfolder belongs to user.

Dolphin never asks me for the root password when I want to mount this hdd.
I run KDE Neon User Edition. Maybe it's an issue of your Linux distribution
or it has to do with the position of the mount option 'users' in your fstab.

In fact, the order of mount options does matter at times.
For example, if you want to use the option 'exec' (which allows you to execute binary files)
then you to have write 'users,exec'.

'exec,users' mounts your device 'noexec'.

So I just did a test to see if the mount option 'users' actually plays a role in this scenario.
And no, it doesn't!
(however if you want to use exec, you still have to write users,exec)

So yeah, it's up to your Linux Distributor, if Dolphin asks you for password or not.