That’s a sh** load of drives but yes you probably do! Man you do create a mess! 
That would be a real pain. Where are they being automounted? You could chown that directory maybe (might not be the best solution!) 
Could be a solution, not sure but makes sense with my limited knowledge.
Well @wordler and @Dougie I tried two drives in the dock together both drives have mounted themselves to /run/media/user/[there own label]. One is formatted to ext4 while the other is NTFS…only the ext4 HDD doesn’t give me permissions. NTFS did not resist, kind of wondering if formatting my drives into ext4 is changing permissions or something.
ntfs/fat32/exfat and friends don’t support POSIX permissions so they get mounted with fixed permissions.
Reformatting a drive will definitely reset the permissions on it. After reformatting it you need to chown it but you should only need to do that once.
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@dalto so just to be sure It should look like this
sudo chown (user) -R /run/media/user/[there own label]
and i will need to do this for every drive I own, and should I take them to another PC running linux or I mess up and require a reinstall I will need to do it all over again ?
I hadn’t realized your external drives were ext4 as well. I guess it makes sense given the issue lol.
I usually keep my externals as exfat or ntfs because I’ve used them on Windows machines.
Well, part of your reformatting process should be to set permissions. Hopefully that isn’t something you do on a regular basis. There are alternatives but they are more complicated.
As for reinstalling, as long as your UID/GID doesn’t change, your permissions will stay intact.
@Dougie and @dalto Is there any issues I should know about when it comes to NTFS drives with Linux at all ?
Like you pointed out NTFS doesn’t support POSIX permissions so it seams more preferable for a external drive which is just backups of all my stuff (files and games).
If so I may just leave all my drives in NTFS tbh… of course that would bring an end to my mounting problems…now id be looking at installing Wine and how to make it install games on my game drive and not in /.wine.
I have heard that NTFS support can be… “spotty” at times but personally I’ve never had any issues.
My Steam drive used to be automounted NTFS (since I used it when I had Windows) and I used it like that for a good while with no issues, but I decided that since it was an internal drive it should be a native filesystem and formatted it.
It’s up to you. I’d say that for important / frequently accessed data use ext4 and for long term storage use NTFS. Just my opinion though, no expert.
The big issues are:
- No POSIX permissions means that things that rely on those permissions won’t work. Further, it means the system can’t properly secure things in those volumes
- ntfs is case insensative so things which rely on case sensitivity will break
- Performance(on linux), will suffer compared to ext4
If you are just using them to store data such as pictures/videos/music it is probably fine. For anything else, you should really pick a filesystem that supports permissions.
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Yea all these drives are strictly storage/backup for I don’t think there should be a problem, just files/pictures/videos/music and games.
Also @dalto & everyone else, still on the topic of drives and how Linux works. I know that Wine creates a virtual dive_C to install windows apps/games. Of course I want all games to install on my 2TB SSD and not my Nvme. can I move the drive_C it makes or is it easier in winecfg to tell it to see my SSD as drive_D or something instead ?
One easy solution is to create directory called wine on your ssd and then create symbolic link into the wine folder with the ln -s command.
So how do symbolic links actually work ?
I am guessing this will so direct wineprefix to the SSD drive as well ?
I printed out the guide done by @keybreak Linux gaming [Guide]
21 pages 0-o but tbh the other guides I see online are so confusing and contradictory as you have the C drive…then wineprefix then someone says there the same… I don’t want to break anything more XD
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@Auron111, on top of that ntfs comes from windows and there are some forbidden characters like *"?<> and filenames like CON PRT. Linux has only one forbidden character /.
edit: forbidden means they cannot be user in the name of the file or folder.
I don’t remember exactly how the paths are but for example lets say your ssd is mounted at /ssd and the wine path is ~/.wine/C_Drive
You can do this:
mkdir /ssd/wine
ln -s /ssd/wine ~/.wine/C_Drive/ssd
Once you do that anything you put in ~/.wine/C_Drive/ssd will really be stored on your SSD.
Basically, the same directory can be connected in the filesystem in more than one place.
I would say it is not exactly like that. Wine creates a directory ~/.wine. Not a drive. Linux does not operate with the concept of drives like windows (c:, d:, …).
Under this directory you can find all configs for that one wine prefix and additional libraries.
You can specify a different path for wine with WINEPREFIX shell variable - e.g. WINEPREFIX=/ssd winecfg will create a new wine structure in /ssd directory. If you do it you will have to always define WINEPREFIX like when running any wine software - e.g. WINEPREFIX=/ssd wine virus.exe. Or put export WINEPREFIX=/ssd in your .bashrc if you use only one prefix.
This is very handy if you have multiple instances of wine each for a different software (32 vs 64-bit, different directx, different dlls).
Since linux works with directories and not drives you do not have to install software in the ~/.wine/drive_c but you can chose a totaly different location - e.g. /ssd/games/. Usually root / is listed under wine as drive z: if you are looking at the paths directly from running windows application (so z:/ssd/games). But you can run anything like WINEPREFIX=/ssd/games/.wine wine /ssd/games/not_in_wine/virus.exe.
It is just more practical to have everything installed under wine’s ~/.wine (or other WINEPREFIX) when you need to do a cleanup. 
Also for a security reason I usually disable drive z:. I do not want windows software access any file outside its dedicated ~/.wine directory (probably a weak security attempt but why tempt the fate 
).
Did I make it confusing enough? 
@vlkon Very confusing
Since I will be using Lutris to install my games, it installs a new wineprefix (I think) for each game I install in /home/[user]/Games/ …can’t I just change an option in Lutris to install them in my SSD to ?
What you say makes sense. I’m just finding this out using wine (play on linux variant). Drives and Directories can be confusing, it had me going for a while! I think I’ve got them sussed now and things are working together. I prefer the Unix way of things, it makes more sense to me but now I have Photoshop as well as Gimp so I am happy with both. Don’t get me started on one vs the other, they are both good.
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