Hi,

I'm looking for a way to make a partition (which seems to have root ownership) writeable to normal users.

I recently partitioned an SD card of mine to ext4 using GParted, so that I could back up to it without worrying about large files. Problem is, it seems to have root ownership, that is, I can't create files on the partition, including copying anything to it, or delete anything from it, without super-user privileges. I tried "chgrp -R users *" but it didn't seem to have any effect, and even when in the root directory of the partition, I can't modify anything, so it seems like the whole partition has root ownership, not just the directories and files.

Is there any way of making this partition writeable to a normal user?

Cheers,
Aston

Please see the owner option to mount: http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount

bcooksley wrote:owner
Allow an ordinary (i.e., non-root) user to mount the file system if he is the owner of the device. This option implies the options nosuid and nodev (unless overridden by subsequent options, as in the option line owner,dev,suid).

I'm allowed to mount it, I just don't have any write permissions in the mount. I tried changing the group for the device with

sudo chgrp users /dev/mmcblk0p1

and that didn't have any effect either :/.

Please see http://www.debianhelp.org/node/11962#comment-42175

Seems like mounting it then changing the ownership of the directory where you mounted it will do the trick...