How To Solve: Cannot Write to Ext3 or Ext4 Partition

Problem:

While installing fresh new Ubuntu 12.04, I created an extra ext3 partition exclusively for Linux usage along with my Root, Swap and Home partition. Problem occurred when I tried to copy something in that particular ext3 partition. I did not have write permission to it. I was surprised to know that I cannot create a folder in the ext3 partition.

Reason:

When I looked at the properties of the ext3 partition, I found that the owner of the partition was root and not the default administrative user.

Solution:

Since the owner was root, the obvious thing to do was to change the owner from root to my default user. I’ll give step-by-step procedure which I followed. The whole procedure is followed in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T).

First thing, change the user to root:

sudo su

Now, identify the partition you are dealing with. Use the fdisk command to see the partitions, their sizes and their type. The output may seem like this:

root@note:/home/note#fdisk -l

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848   215541759   107667456    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       215544166   625141759   204798797    f  W95 Ext’d (LBA)
/dev/sda5       215544168   420340724   102398278+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6       461080576   468891647     3905536   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7       468893696   625141759    78124032   83  Linux
/dev/sda8       420341760   461066239    20362240   83  Linux

The partition which was looking for was /dev/sda7 which I identified by its size (approx. 78 GB). Once you got the partition’s device number, its time to find out its UUID. Use the blkid command for that:

root@note:/home/note# blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL=”System Reserved” UUID=”E400CABD00CA95C8″ TYPE=”ntfs”
/dev/sda2: UUID=”E61CD55A89D525F9″ TYPE=”ntfs”
/dev/sda5: UUID=”01CB76F7C25198FB0″ TYPE=”ntfs”
/dev/sda6: UUID=”d389de2d-3a6d-4ed7-94dc-c0f3d560e325″ TYPE=”swap”
/dev/sda7: UUID=”f920adf0-6018-4335-8314-4e1b79ca2d6b” TYPE=”ext4″
/dev/sda8: UUID=”a159c031-5f44-4187-b6dd-fea76235b36c” TYPE=”ext4″

In the above command I got the UUID of /dev/sda7. Now change the ownership. Use the following command:

chown username /media/Desired-UUID

Replace username and Desired-UUID with correct values. Unmount and mount the ext3 partition again. Enjoy full access to it now. Cheers