Hello Linux Helpdesk. ;)

I use Fedora (currently 40), and have done for a while.

I always LUKS+Ext4 encrypt my local drive and decided to do the same to my external hard drive.

Last week I reinstalled Fedora 40 from a Bootable USB, but when I tried to access my files om my external drive it now gives me the error

You do not have permission to view the content of “Files”.

I’ve read online it’s due to me no longer being the “Owner” of the drive I was in my previous install of Fedora and now I’m a different user and apparently no users a part from Owner have any permissions on an EXT4+LUKS drive.

Is there any way to give myself permission to see the content again or did I bonk my backup? As a note, I DO have the correct Luks password, it shows me the name of the encrypted disk after decrypting, which is “Files”

Thank you in advance.

Edit: Thank you everybody, thanks to you I’ve been able to rescue my files. Y’all deserve a great day!

  • mlfh@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 months ago

    /dev/sda is the whole raw disk - you typically don’t want to directly interact with /dev/sda, unless you are partitioning or overwriting it. There are a few layers between that device and the files:

    • raw disk - /dev/sda
    • disk partition - /dev/sda1
    • luks container - when unlocked, mapped to /dev/mapper/{name}
    • ext4 filesystem inside the luks container, mounted somewhere like /mnt, /media, etc

    You’ll need to find where that ext4 filesystem is mounted, and run the chown command on that. You can run lsblkand see a tree of the above hierarchy, with the ext4 filesystem’s mountpount shown in the right-hand column.