Hello Linux Helpdesk. ;)
I use Fedora (currently 40), and have done for a while.
I always LUKS+Ext4 encrypt my local drive and decided to do the same to my external hard drive.
Last week I reinstalled Fedora 40 from a Bootable USB, but when I tried to access my files om my external drive it now gives me the error
You do not have permission to view the content of “Files”.
I’ve read online it’s due to me no longer being the “Owner” of the drive I was in my previous install of Fedora and now I’m a different user and apparently no users a part from Owner have any permissions on an EXT4+LUKS drive.
Is there any way to give myself permission to see the content again or did I bonk my backup? As a note, I DO have the correct Luks password, it shows me the name of the encrypted disk after decrypting, which is “Files”
Thank you in advance.
Edit: Thank you everybody, thanks to you I’ve been able to rescue my files. Y’all deserve a great day!
Use udisksctl mount and not the old mount command. This should work. No need to change ownership.
this is a file permission issue, nothing to do with LUKS. The solution should be to access the files as root. You could use the command “Sudo chmod a+rwx /path/to/drive” to set completely accessible file permissions, which is not a best practice typically, but would be fine here since the drive’s encrypted.
Use chown to change ownership or chmod to change rights. The -R option makes them also change the permissions for all files and directories inside of the directory.
sudo chown -R <username>:<usergroup> /pathto/Files
Another user suggests youruser:youruser and not usergroup, if usergroup would I just use the Owner group or?
Thank you for your answer.
I believe you can just do youruser: and chmod automatically uses the correct group. The other user is also technically correct as the usergroup is called the same as the user so both commands are the same.
Typically the user group is identical to the username but not always. For example a name containing uppercase letters may be transformed to be all lowercase for the user but contain both cases in the group.
Thus you should get the user group in scripting separate from $USER
youruser:youruser just means the user’s group. For instance, on my fedora 40 install, my user (bippy, just a silly name), is the username for my user, but also the name of the group that my user belongs to.
So when I do a chown, I typically do chown -R bippy:bippy path/to/directory
If you wanted to give permissions to a different group on your system, but also to your main user, you could do a chown -R bippy:wheel /path/to/directory (wheel is an example group name, which is similar to sudoers)
Your files are not lost. You will be able to access them with your local root user, either through the command line or a GUI file explorer that supports actions as root.
You could try using bindfs to spoof the original user id and then chown the whole drive after successfull mounting (i’m a noob, just my understanding of the issue, don’t know if that’s really possible)
Will look into this if @wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 's suggestion doesn’t work.
