could not enter folder /media/myuser/partitionname

Question

My laptop has two hard drives: an SSD and an HDD. I put the root partition on the SSD and divided the HDD to two partitions, one for /home and the other contains my personal data.

After installing Kubuntu, I can't access it. In the Dolphin file manager, I get the error:

Could not enter folder /media/haider/MyFiles

Is this a permissions issue or something else?

lsblk screenshot:

media folder content:

Answer 1

The folder /media/haider has the permissions 700 and is owned by root. This prevents anyone except root from doing anything to that directory.

Assuming your user name and group name is both haider you can change the ownership of the directory so you can access it:

sudo chown -R haider:haider /media/haider

This will set the user and group for /media/haider to haider and allow you to access the directory. This also applies to all files and subdirectories inside /media/haider

You could then set permissions to 750 to allow others in the haider group to read and execute on the directory, but not allow write access.

chmod 750 /media/haider

Other users in the haider group still might not be able to see or access any files if the permissions on the files and directories are still 700 inside /media/haider. It is fine to set the other directories to 750 but it is good practice to set files to 640 to avoid any possible security issues (of course, this is less of an issue for purely media files, but still good practice, nonetheless).

To set directories inside /media/haider/ to 750:

find /media/haider/. -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;

To set files inside /media/haider/ to 640:

find /media/haider/. -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;

I would recommend against setting 777 permissions on that folder for the purposes of allowing others access. Instead, utilize groups and set permissions on the folder to follow the principle of least priviledge.