While installing fresh new Ubuntu, 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.
Fix Issue with writing on Ext3 or Ext4 partition
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.
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 :)
