Computer: Lenovo T500
Operating System: Ubuntu 9.04
External Hard Drive: 250GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini
I recently purchased the external Maxtor hard drive cited above that I would like to backup data to from my notebook computer. But before using the drive for this purpose, it is necessary to reformat the drive to something other than the manufacturer's preformatted file system type: NTFS. For this purpose, I chose to reformat the drive to ext3 using GParted, to match the default Ubuntu 9.04 file system type selected during OS installation.
The drive reformat process I used is as follows: I plugged the drive in, unmounted it, and then ran GParted via its GUI. From GParted, I created a new partition table (Device > Create Partition Table), and then formated the "unallocated" drive to ext3, leaving all other settings in their default mode. Upon completion of the format operation, I then closed GParted, unplugged the drive, waited a few seconds, and plugged the drive back in. Ubuntu properly detects the device, and invokes the Nautilus file manager with the drive selected and the right pane displaying a ">lost+found" file.
The problem I have encountered, is that the drive's Owner and Group permissions are set to root. This is made evident by the fact that a new folder within the file system cannot be created, and by what is displayed in the Permissions tab of the file system's disk Properties: Owner: root. Group: root.
Please note that I used the same drive format procedure to format the drive to fat32, and the following permissions were granted by default: Owner: "home folder". Group: root.
What I would like to know is as follows:
I. Is the external drive format procedure I am using valid?
A. If valid, then why are both the Owner and Group Permissions set to "root" by default?
1. What is the recommended procedure for changing the ownership permissions from "root" to that which corresponds to the name of my home folder?
2. Can this be done through Gnome's file manager GUI rather than the command line?
a. If "yes", then how?
b. If "no", then why not?
B) If invalid, then what is the recommended procedure? Please explain in detail.
Thanks for your kind attention!
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