Permission denied on mounted devices

Question

I have checked many similar questions but the solutions didn't work for me. On my previous Debian wheezy installation I could mount devices from GUI with no permission problem and also after upgrading to jessie. But on my new Debian jessie installation devices mount in a read-only state whether ntfs partitions on the same HDD as my Debian installation or external USB devices, for both root user and normal user, I can't write and modify data on mounted devices.

I have found these lines in syslog that seems to be related.

udisksd[1281]: Mounted /dev/sda4 at /media/<user>/<uuid> on behalf of uid 1000
udisksd[1281]: Cleaning up mount point /media/<user>/<uuid> (device 8:4 is not mounted)
udisksd[1281]: Unmounted /dev/sda4 on behalf of uid 1000
kernel: [  125.190099] ntfs: volume version 3.1.
udisksd[1281]: Mounted /dev/sda4 at /media/<user>/<uuid> on behalf of uid 1000
org.gtk.Private.UDisks2VolumeMonitor[1224]: index_parse.c:191: indx_parse(): error opening /media/<user>/<uuid>/BDMV/index.bdmv
org.gtk.Private.UDisks2VolumeMonitor[1224]: index_parse.c:191: indx_parse(): error opening /media/<user>/<uuid>/BDMV/BACKUP/index.bdmv
org.gnome.Nautilus[1224]: Gtk-Message: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged.
kernel: [  137.739543] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739579] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739655] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739678] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739702] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739767] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739791] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739814] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739894] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.
kernel: [  137.739921] ntfs: (device sda4): ntfs_setattr(): Changes in user/group/mode are not supported yet, ignoring.

I'm trying to figure out what makes the difference between two installations. In my new installation, unlike the previous one, I didn't install gnome task completely but only the minimal gnome packages. And the other difference is that the first time I created a fresh partition table and formatted all the partitions, ext4 and ntfs, then installed windows and then Debian, but second time I used the same partition table and only formatted ext4 partitions. Both times dual-boot with windows.

The output of cat /etc/mtab for two internal and external mounted devices reads as follows:

/dev/sdb1 /media/<user>/<uuid> ntfs rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0177,dmask=077,nls=utf8,errors=continue,mft_zone_multiplier=1 0 0
/dev/sda4 /media/<user>/<uuid> ntfs rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0177,dmask=077,nls=utf8,errors=continue,mft_zone_multiplier=1 0 0

Answer 1

After hours searching, there seems to be different causes for this issue and different solutions for each one.

I'm not an expert to provide a comprehensive answer so I hint to some frequent situations on the topic:

• Ownership/permission issues for mounted devices on mount points:
  File permissions won't change
  USB drive auto-mounted by user but gets write permissions for root only

• Damaged file-system that for security reasons mounts the device as read-only:
  Permission Denied on External Hard Drive

• Hibernated windows that doesn't permit a write access to windows partitions on dual-boot systems:
  Unable to mount Windows (NTFS) filesystem due to hibernation

• And the one that led me to answer is the type of mounting based on the file-system:
  Why can't I write on External Hard disk?

My problem was the missing NTFS driver package ntfs-3g that caused the system use the Linux kernel NTFS driver ntfs. As mentioned in Debian Wiki NTFS page, ntfs, Linux kernel NTFS driver, provides read-only access, and ntfs-3g, Userspace NTFS driver via FUSE, provides read and write access.

# apt-get install ntfs-3g and a system reboot solved the problem for me.

Answer 2

I was having "permission denied" errors while trying to read the contents of some files on an NTFS partition - even as root. There were no permissions problems with the folder tree (checked with namei -l $PWD).

/var/log/syslog was showing an error in ntfs-3g every time I failed to read the contents of a file:

Jun 20 21:27:23 matthew-pc ntfs-3g[5653]: ntfs_attr_pread error reading '/Users/Matthew/Documents/test.txt' at offset 0: 566 <> -1: Permission denied

After reading https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ntfs-3g/+bug/307289, I realised the problem files were encrypted, which naturally prevented me from reading them, but the error itself didn't help me very much.