# [Solved, mostly] Can't access external HDD

## mark2

I have an Iomega hard drive connected through a USB port. I can see it listed in Dolphin, but I get an error message:

```
An error occurred while accessing 'IOMEGA_HDD', the system responded: An unspecified error has occurred.: Not Authorizedv
```

The same problem exists with an iPod (2G) requiring root perrmission:

```
An error occurred while accessing '32.0 MiB Hard Drive', the system responded: The requested operation has failed.: Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 1: helper failed with:

mount: only root can mount /dev/sda1 on /boot
```

Any ideas on what I am missing here? I am still very new to linux and Gentoo in particular.

Regards,

~Mark

----------

## Christian99

probably you are not in the proper group.

Should be the disk group.

Check if you are in that group (command "groups") and add yourself to it if not ("gpasswd -a <username> disk"). Then it should be fine (don't forget to logout/login)

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## mark2

Sorry, that didn't work. I even rebooted and now I don't see either drive. However, when I open a terminal and su in as root, the drives show up, but still cannot be accessed.

This time the error code from IOMEGA_HDD was:

```
An error occurred while accessing 'IOMEGA_HDD', the system responded: An unspecified error has occurred.: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
```

The message from the iPod was the same as before.

Regards,

~Mark

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## NeddySeagoon

Christian99,

No ordinary user should ever be in the disk group.  That gives them raw access to your HDD.

Such a user can bypass your filesystem to steal your /etc/shadow with all your password hashes and read/write any file on the system. 

This is generally considered to be a verybadthing.

For devices with FAT filesystems, with permissions that do not map to *NIX permissons, you pass the mount command a gid and uid that should be applied to all the files on the volume.  See 

```
man mount
```

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## mark2

That drive does have a FAT file system. But how do I find its gid and uid? I found the section for Mount options for fat, but I don't understand what to use.

Regards,

~Mark

----------

## _______0

that indicates that something is borked in your KDE installation or you forgot to add yourself into a key group or forgot some USE flag related to external devices.

mounting in terminal as root should be fine. As user you could use most likely this mount -o uid=1000.

Find out your uid with the id command.

There's no shortage of instructions online about mounting vfat filesystem under linux.

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## Christian99

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> Christian99,
> 
> No ordinary user should ever be in the disk group.  That gives them raw access to your HDD.
> 
> Such a user can bypass your filesystem to steal your /etc/shadow with all your password hashes and read/write any file on the system. 
> ...

 

oh sorry, my fault. just looked at the device files and saw that they belong to group disk. didn't consider that disks are different than eg printers/scanners.... where the group of their devicefiles indicates in which group you have to be to use them.

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## mark2

I got the external drive mounted finally. I had to create a folder /windows/C and edit the /etc/fstab file, and then mount it. It allows me to view and work with the files. This allowed me to get my bookmarks file and the driver for my printer, which has another issue. The second part, however, about accessing the iPod still provides the same error so I have more homework to do there.

Regards,

~Mark

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## NeddySeagoon

Christian99,

There are two ways to access block devices.

Through the file system that they hold, which is the normal way, which enforces permissions and all the other filesystem provided features.

As raw block devices, which is what membership of the disk group provides.

----------

