Setting up the new computer's hdd

[Odyssey]

The older computer is now ensconced in another city, so I can turn my attention to organizing the new one. One thing that I find frustrating about Linux so far is that once you have figured out what you want to do and how to go about it, you find that you have new problems to solve in order to implement. Whinge, whine.

The hdd (500GB SATA) is set up:
Primary partitions:
sda1 46.7 GB NTFS (Cannot for the life of me remember why I formated sda1 as NTFS.)
sda2 1.86 /swap
sda3 7.45 /
Extended:
sda4 409.88
sda5 37.25 /home
sda6 372.66 /media/disk

Under "Places" there appear two (slightly different icons): 50 GB Media and 400.1 GB Media. These appear to be sda1 and sda6 respectively.

When I click on the 400 GB icon, it shows only one folder: Lost + Found with properties as: contents unreadable and 350.9GB of free disk space. One forum post says:


lost+found is a directory that fsck uses to store any unconnected files or directories it finds after a dirty shutdown

Don't recall any traumatic shutdowns, but I found all of this as a result of trying to copy files from my windows computer into this partition and got a "no permission to write to this.." denial. And when I right click into the empty space below the "Lost + Found" the Create Folder, Create Document, and Paste options are all greyed out.

Any ideas how to figure out what, if anything, is in Lost + Found (doubt it) and what to do about restoring permissions?

[Odyssey]

Dredging up my limit cli knowledge, I have managed to get into /device/disk and using: sudo ls -al lost+found:

drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2008-09-23 13:03 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-09-23 13:03 ..

So there are two files with different permissions? Do I need to do anything with these files?

Now permissions are the most difficult thing for me to understand as you may recall from earlier posts.
/device/disk
I found your howto on changing permissions, but don't understand exactly how it applies to this situation, but think I need to change permissions. I (think I but don't know how to confirm) have set up another workgroup (robertgroup) using the GUI and included both /root and /Robert in the group

As I understand it while still in the /device/disk directory in the cli, is the command:

chmod o-x /home/robertgroup

but I get this message:

chmod: cannot access `/home/robertgroup': No such file or directory

I will be the first to admit that I don't know what I'm doing here. Your patient guidance is appreciated.

[Gina]

The older computer is now ensconced in another city, so I can turn my attention to organizing the new one. One thing that I find frustrating about Linux so far is that once you have figured out what you want to do and how to go about it, you find that you have new problems to solve in order to implement. Whinge, whine.

The hdd (500GB SATA) is set up:
Primary partitions:
sda1 46.7 GB NTFS (Cannot for the life of me remember why I formated sda1 as NTFS.)
sda2 1.86 /swap
sda3 7.45 /
Extended:
sda4 409.88
sda5 37.25 /home
sda6 372.66 /media/diskWell, you could copy all the data off the NTFS partition onto another then reformat to ext3 if you wish. You could then move it back to the newly formatted partition.

Under "Places" there appear two (slightly different icons): 50 GB Media and 400.1 GB Media. These appear to be sda1 and sda6 respectively.
Yes, I agree.
When I click on the 400 GB icon, it shows only one folder: Lost + Found with properties as: contents unreadable and 350.9GB of free disk space.
Don't recall any traumatic shutdowns, but I found all of this as a result of trying to copy files from my windows computer into this partition and got a "no permission to write to this.." denial.All new folders contain this sub-folder - this is quite normal. It doesn't mean there actually has been a "dirty" shut down - it's just there in case. The "Lost + Found" folder is a system folder and not designed for general use. And when I right click into the empty space below the "Lost + Found" the Create Folder, Create Document, and Paste options are all greyed out. This means the partition was created as root and you will need to change the owner (with sudo chown).
Any ideas how to figure out what, if anything, is in Lost + Found (doubt it) and what to do about restoring permissions?If you want to look in "Lost + Found" you can do it as root (sudo ls <foldername>) - - man chown in a terminal will show how to use chown (change owner)
Basically, chown <username> <path-to-folder>

I'll answer your last post in more detail later but basically... You're getting users and groups mixed up. There is no home folder for a group, only for each user. Groups can be useful where there are multiple users on a system and you want to group users into categories as far as permissions are concerned. In other words, you can give permission to users of a particular group to access certain files only. For single user systems, groups are of no benefit. It all stems from Linux being derived from Unix which is used on large systems with dozens or hundreds of users.

[onomatopoeia]

Dredging up my limit cli knowledge, I have managed to get into /device/disk and using: sudo ls -al lost+found:

drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2008-09-23 13:03 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-09-23 13:03 ..

So there are two files with different permissions? Do I need to do anything with these files?


Don't touch them, they aren't "real" files at all. If you do an ls -a on any directory you will see the dot and dotdot entries in all of them.

. means "this directory"
.. means "the parent directory"

[Odyssey]

Ono, thanks for the heads up. As you mention it, dim bulbs light up and I do recall that from my entry work into linux.

OK, here is the solution:

robert@CoreDuo:/media/disk$ sudo mkdir files
robert@CoreDuo:/media/disk$ ls -ld
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2008-10-07 16:16 .
robert@CoreDuo:/media/disk$ ls
files lost+found
robert@CoreDuo:/media/disk$ sudo chown robert files
robert@CoreDuo:/media/disk$ sudo chgrp robertgroup files

Now copying over, albeit slower than I had expected (640KB/sec +/-) :beer

Thanks, both. Will be back to you shortly with my next problem :lol

robert

[Gina]

Glad to see you worked it out and got a result :):) No need for me to elaborate on the above then :)