second HDD format and partition?

[virtdave@mcn.org]

Open terminal

sudo chmod 0777 /media/bigdisk

I've done this, a couple of times, but when I try to read bigdisk, I am still told I don't have permission, and there's a little padlock icon on the folder when I go to /media/bigdisk. I noticed that /media/bigdisk seems to be in the home folder, is that germane?

[benzarti]

What returns

sudo mount

?

[virtdave@mcn.org]

What returns

sudo mount

?

a bunch of stuff about other disks, but the following regarding sdb1:

dev/sdb1 on /media/bigdisk type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks)

[benzarti]

Try

sudo cd /media/bigdisk
sudo chmod 0775 ./
sudo chown $USER:$USER ./

[rewyllys]

There are a number of advantages to using separate partitions for / (root) and /home. A major one is that having a separate /home partition makes it much easier to update your OS or to change it.

You can have the separate partitions on different hard drives, or on the same hard drive if there is space for them.

[oldfred]

Did you do both the chmod and the chown?

[virtdave@mcn.org]

well.....although I still can't directly read what's in bigdisk, gparted now tells me it's in use, and that some stuff is being stored there. I thank everyone for their input. I don't really need to view the stuff directly, but I am gonna assume that Ubuntu is now putting files that don't need quick access there, since about 7GB (out of the 500GB total available) now seems to be filled with data--and the SSD which has the boot stuff in it is now a bit less full than before I formatted bigdisk.....