Plex media Server cannot find media

[TheDavidJohnson]

Thank you to everyone for the info in this thread. I'm on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32-bit and was unable to mount my external USB drive to any location other than /mnt and have Plex recognize it. This thread gave me the tipoff: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2139064

Ultimately I had to add the plex user to my group as well, but it's working quite nicely now!

[drew-j-harrison]

Appreciate all the tips but I am still having the same problem here. Reformatted from NTFS to EXT4, added permissions for both plugdev and 'drew' groups and still getting zero recognition of folders or files from Plex (FYI XBMC has no problem). Currently using 13.04 with a Mediasonic 8 drive RAID box (HF2-SU3S2) over eSATA. Any help is appreciated already have 10 hours in to this problem to no avail. Here's couple clips from the terminal checks if this helps at all.

drew@Drews-Home-Office-PC:~$ groups plex

plex : plex plugdev drew

drew@Drews-Home-Office-PC:~$ ls -l

total 56
drwxr-xr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Aug 28 19:05 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Aug 30  2009 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 3 drew drew 4096 Aug 30 02:20 Downloads
-rw-r--r-- 1 drew drew 8445 Aug 30  2009 examples.desktop
drwxrwxr-x 5 drew drew 4096 Jan 24  2013 FrostWire
drwxr-xr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Aug 29 20:46 Music
drwxr-xr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Aug 30  2009 Pictures
lrwxrwxrwx 1 drew drew   36 Jan 23  2013 PlayOnLinux's virtual drives -> /home/drew/.PlayOnLinux//wineprefix/

drwxr-xr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Aug 30  2009 Public
drwxr-xr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Aug 30  2009 Templates
drwxrwxr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Jan 22  2013 Ubuntu One
drwxr-xr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Aug 30  2009 Videos
drwxrwxr-x 2 drew drew 4096 Jan 23  2013 Windows Apps

The current file path for the storage is /media/drew/Media Storage

[drew-j-harrison]

I got it working just had to change the mount location. As posted in another thread apparently it is not possible for anything other than the system to access the default mounting location.

[TimEnid]

Can someone walk me thru this? I am having the same issue. The drives marked Movies and Home are the ones i want to show up in plex.

tim@tim:/media/tim$ ls -l
total 484
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Aug 16 22:18 Buffalo 1.5tb
drwx------ 1 tim tim 28672 Aug 31 01:33 Buffalo 1.5tb1
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 May 6 16:52 Buffalo 3.0
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Aug 16 22:18 Buffalo 3.01
drwx------ 1 tim tim 430080 Aug 31 11:00 Buffalo 3.02
drwxrwxr-x 1 tim tim 8192 May 26 16:54 Home
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 May 31 19:49 Iomega 3.0
drwxrwxrwx 2 tim tim 4096 Apr 27 13:04 Media
drwxrwxrwx 5 tim plugdev 4096 Aug 31 12:12 Movies
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 May 25 19:55 WD

[drew-j-harrison]

Can someone walk me thru this? I am having the same issue. The drives marked Movies and Home are the ones i want to show up in plex.

I actually did not use the terminal to mount it. Under the disk manager you can select the partition settings and modify the mount options. It's fairly straight forward. If you are still having issues reply again and I will try and give further detail. FYI NTFS works just fine.

[moyeboy13]

all, i'm still having a problem with my Plex install on 13.04. i have done much (if not all) of what has been suggested here. i have moved the mount point of my Pictures volume to /mnt/Pictures from /media/Pictures. i have added the plex user to the plugdev group as well as my username group. Plex still cannot find the media located in that directory.

a little about my system. it's an older machine, hence why i want to run Plex on Ubuntu instead of Windows. i took a single 2TB drive and formatted it into an extended partition (ext4) and created multiple partitions. the reason i wanted to do it this way is so that my girls could see their shows in their libraries instead of seeing mom & dad's movies/tv shows or music files.

i'm really at a loss at this point. i did a chmod 777 on the /mnt/Pictures partition and it's owner is my username. what am i missing?

thanks for any assistance that you might be able to provide.

[TimEnid]

all, i'm still having a problem with my Plex install on 13.04. i have done much (if not all) of what has been suggested here. i have moved the mount point of my Pictures volume to /mnt/Pictures from /media/Pictures. i have added the plex user to the plugdev group as well as my username group. Plex still cannot find the media located in that directory.

a little about my system. it's an older machine, hence why i want to run Plex on Ubuntu instead of Windows. i took a single 2TB drive and formatted it into an extended partition (ext4) and created multiple partitions. the reason i wanted to do it this way is so that my girls could see their shows in their libraries instead of seeing mom & dad's movies/tv shows or music files.

i'm really at a loss at this point. i did a chmod 777 on the /mnt/Pictures partition and it's owner is my username. what am i missing?

thanks for any assistance that you might be able to provide.

i changed my mount point to /srv/movies and plex fines it just fine.

[jsavga]

Hi guys, just ran into this issue today. As others have mentioned in other forums the problem is that the "plex" user doesn't belong to the "plugdev" group which is the only group that has access to the mounted devices.
All you need to do is to add plex to that group by using gpasswd

sudo gpasswd -a plex plugdev

To check that the "plex" user belongs to that group we can issue the following command:

groups plex

Which should display something like: plex: plex plugdev

Restart your computer and try to access the mounted media with Plex Media Manager.

Thank you so much for that. Running 13.10, I added plex to the plugdev group, rebooted and now it sees my media. I can now click on my mounted Windows drives and get the directories list (before it wouldn't show anything other than the drive) and select the media directories and they show up in plex. Thanks again.

[midimarcus]

I had same problem on Ubuntu 13.10 with a second HD, in my case auto-mounted at boot, and I solved it by changing permissions of mounted folder.
My mountpoint was /media/moovee with "movies" and "tvshows" folder inside.
Initial permissions were:

drwx------ moovee 700

and plex was unable to scan files in subfolders.
When I set 777 permissions:

drwxrwxrwx moovee

In my case 777 can be safe enough, but consider setting more restrictive permissions depending on your specific needs (personal or shared pc, nas, etc...).

Hope this help.

[Ivan_C]

I actually did not use the terminal to mount it. Under the disk manager you can select the partition settings and modify the mount options. It's fairly straight forward. If you are still having issues reply again and I will try and give further detail. FYI NTFS works just fine.

Could someone else confirm NTFS works? I have a 1TB HDD which was originally running windows 7 so the whole thing is running on NTFS. I decided to dual boot Linux Mint based on Ubuntu by making some space for the OS partition. The dual boot thing works fine but I want to have plex media server running as this is intended to be a headless media server.

Plex can only see my root directory and my home directory, it cannot see the other NTFS partition where I have my media files! .. I tried adding plex to plugdev as advised here but that didn't work. I still have to try adding plex to my user group but if thats not going to do much I was thinking of buying another hard drive, format it with a filesystem that would play nice with PMS and see if that works..

Input anyone?