I just installed Cachyos and I’m having trouble with mount points I think. At boot, I need a password to mount sata drives, and whatever permissions I change don’t stay after rebooting. From what I can tell, it has to do with the drives mounting on /run/media, and apparently /run is a temp folder or something.

I think I need to change the mount points to something else, like /media (which doesn’t exist and I’m hoping I can just create the folder and use it as a mount point?)

fstab is confusing me, can anyone help me with a quick rundown?

Edit: Think I’ve got it using gnome disk utility. I switched the mounts, everything boots up connected now. Had an issue where I couldn’t read or write to the drives tho haha, but seems to have corrected after a reboot ( I think I may have installed ntfs-3g before the reboot). The owner and group for all of them are now root for some reason, but it seems to be working anyway.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 hours ago

    I think I may have installed ntfs-3g before the reboot

    Isn’t this the legacy driver? Why do you need it?

    …Respectfully, it feels like you’re falling into the classic Arch trap of “messing with too much stuff.”

    I mount a whole bunch of NTFS Sata partitions at boot, on CachyOS, and they don’t need a password or FUSE driver package or anything. It just works out of the box. The only thing I chose to mess with was adding a single mount flag in fstab, and only so it plays with Windows permissions better.

    • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
      1·
      3 hours ago

      You’re probably right. Did your drives mount in /run? That’s where mine mounted on initial install which kicked off this whole thing. I read that /run was temp and that’s why they need to be manually mounted with password at boot. I had no issues in Ubuntu Studio, and after finally finding the locations in /run I just figured it’s how Cachy does it.

      I’m debating just reinstalling from scratch and starting over. I must have done something wrong at install.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 hours ago

        I just let KDE handle it. I think… it was a long time ago. I’ll turn on my PC and check my fstab in a sec.

        But yeah. I’d recommend a fresh install, with the philosophy of “don’t mess with the defaults unless it isn’t working, or you have a very good reason.” As not only are CachyOS defaults pretty good, but they’re set up in a way so the system will maintain itself through updates.

        It’s (ironically) very different than my experience with Ubuntu, where I had to manually maintain a bunch of stuff and fight the system packages.

  • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    22 hours ago

    For managing drives and mount points I usually use gnome-disk-utility because it makes everything easier and it uses mount options like nofail by default. You can choose whether a drive requires password to mount in there too.

    • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
      1·
      22 hours ago

      Interesting. I just checked, is this right? Unmount > additional partition options > deselect user session defaults > edit mount point to /media? The existing mount point in that section is /mnt/2c148… is that meant to be different from /run/media that it’s currently on?

      • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        17 hours ago

        /run/media is for ephemeral mount points (like a removable USB drive). /mnt is for more permanent mount points. Idr what /media is for but I have seen some Linux distros also use it for removable media.

        • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
          1·
          17 hours ago

          Appreciate it. I made a folder called media in root and mounted them there per your suggestion with gnome disk utility. I think part of the problem may have been I didn’t know to install ntfs-3g (only used Ubuntu Studio prior to this which had a bunch of stuff auto installed). I had an issue after mounting where all the drives were read only but a reboot solved it, though I think I installed ntfs-3g right before the reboot so I can’t be sure what made it work. The drives are all owner group root root now but they work at least.

          • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            12 hours ago

            I can’t tell if you are saying you literally mounted the drive at /media or that you mounted it at a subfolder, example: /media/drive1. The 2nd is the proper way of doing it.

            Either way, glad I could help!

            • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
              1·
              6 hours ago

              Sorry it’s the second. Each drive has a folder in /media that it’s mounted in. Not sure if they’re meant to be root:root though, when I chown nothing changes. I think I might need figure out chmod 755 stuff. It all seems to be working except my server can’t write to any of them, it says they’re read-only. They’re also mounted as fuseblk.

  • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    23 hours ago

    From what I can tell, it has to do with the drives mounting on /run/media, and apparently /run is a temp folder or something.

    Probably not. Yes /run is a tmpfs, but that doesn’t affect any other filesystems mounted inside of it - those have their own permissions (or don’t in the case of FAT).

    Since the drives are being mounted in /run/media they’re probably being mounted by your file manager, not via /etc/fstab. You could instead have them mounted on boot by the root user via /etc/fstab (the classic way) or systemd.mount (slightly friendlier), or configure polkit to allow mounting drives without a password (more reasonable if you’re talking about external or thumb drives).

    The permission issue is probably for a different reason. Are you sure the filesystem(s) you’re mounting supports POSIX style permissions? FAT doesn’t, and NTFS requires a special flag for it. The files might look like they have permissions, but they’re coming from the mount options and modifying them will either fail outright or not do anything.

    Edit: Run lsblk -f to see all connected drives, partitions and file systems and their file system type.

    • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
      2·
      23 hours ago

      Since the drives are being mounted in /run/media they’re probably being mounted by your file manager, not via /etc/fstab. You could instead have them mounted on boot by the root user via /etc/fstab (the classic way) or systemd.mount (slightly friendlier),

      This is where I’m stuck. I read that changing the mount via fstab requires the UUID, which I can see with lsblk -f. But /etc/fstab has the same UUID for every drive, I have no idea what to do with it. As it is the 3 internal sata drives don’t auto mount (even though they’re selected in settings) and require a password to mount, and revert pemissions after reboot. I read it’s due to /run but I’m stuck.

      The permission issue is probably for a different reason. Are you sure the filesystem(s) you’re mounting supports POSIX style permissions? FAT doesn’t, and NTFS requires a special flag for it. The files might look like they have permissions, but they’re coming from the mount options and modifying them will either fail outright or not do anything.

      They’re NTFS. I just switched from Ubuntu Studio to Cachyos and they worked fine with mounting and permissions on Studio. Studio had them mounted in /media, took me a while to find that they were under /run/media on Cachy.

      • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        4·
        22 hours ago

        But /etc/fstab has the same UUID for every drive, I have no idea what to do with it.

        That would be because every entry (except /boot and /tmp) is a subvolume of the same btrfs volume. Your other drives just aren’t in there.

        You might want to read man fstab and maybe the Arch wiki pages for fstab and NTFS. It’s not that difficult as long as you make sure to not reboot with a broken fstab (using nofail is also a good idea). And yes you can just mount them to /media if you want, as long as the mount point is an empty directory.

        Ubuntu Studio might have achieved this in a different way but since you’re in Arch land now it’s probably better to do what the Arch documentation recommends.

        • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
          2·
          22 hours ago

          Haha yeah it’s been a journey. 5 months into Linux but I’ve learned a ton. I’ll start digging into this and in the mean time just settle for mounting at boot and changing the permissions to /run/media/USER every time so my server can get in. Appreciate the time, thank you.

              • littleomid@feddit.orgEnglish
                1·
                4 hours ago

                Then please post the output of lsblk -f.

                All you need to do after that is to take the UUID and add it to /etc/fstab.

                • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caOP
                  1·
                  4 hours ago

                  Thank you. I’ve since changed the mount point to /media/user/drive folder with gnome disk utility. They now boot up no problem, but I’ve hit some other snags haha. The mount point is owned by me but the drives themselves are root with full privileges for all users (not sure if that’s normal, chown does nothing). I can manually create, delete, move, etc in the drives but my media server (emby) can access everything but cannot create or modify, it says the drives are read only. I can’t remember the command I used to check but the all seem to be rw enabled. I can’t change the group to emby from root either, chown seems like it succeeds but permissions don’t change. They’re also all fuseblk filesystem now.

                  Everything but the server seems to be working but I don’t feel like it’s right with permissions. After Ubuntu Studio I thought I’d have a handle on going to arch-based haha, everything else is perfect it’s just this drive stuff that’s not right.