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I am no longer able to access external drives on my computer (running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). It was working fine a few weeks ago, so I'm not sure what changed.

I get this error message when trying to open the drive in Nautilus, for both USB drives and my extra hard drive:

Unable to access "8.1 GB Volume"
Not authorized to perform action

When I run Nautilus as root, it doesn't even show the drives. I was able to run sudo gnome-disks and interact with the drives that way. If I just run gnome-disks, then I don't have permissions and get the same error message.

I don't have this issue on another Ubuntu 18.04 LTS machine with the same USB drive. Nautilus without root works fine. So I don't think the issue is with the drives but rather is with the computer.

catanasian
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4 Answers4

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I finally figured it out. My user account was part of the chrome-remote-desktop group. Once I removed it from that group and restarted my computer, auto-mounting and accessing the drives works as expected.

I had added my user to the chrome-remote-desktop following this post: https://superuser.com/a/850359/588342. After doing so, chrome-remote-desktop auto-runs on startup. Instead of that, I just added a command to run it in "Startup Applications Preferences": /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop --start

catanasian
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  • Hello, what is your solution? Keep using remote-desktop and auto mount at the same time. I mean once you add your user back to that group `chrome-remote-desktop` auto mount is not working, but when you remove the user from that group, remote-desktop is not working. – sflee Jan 12 '20 at 12:49
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    I removed my user from the group `chrome-remote-desktop` and added chrome-remote-desktop to the startup applications via the GUI. Both auto mount and chrome-remote-desktop are working for me now. – catanasian Jan 14 '20 at 01:21
  • Thank you very much. – sflee Jan 14 '20 at 02:18
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Use command:

sudo chown yourusername:yourusername /media/yourusername/path_to_mounted_volume

In nautilus user mode the volumes are mounted in /media/yourusername/

Replace yourusername with your user name and path_to_mounted_volume with path from command: 

ls -l /media/yourusername/
kukulo
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  • `ls -l /media/yourusername/` returns `total 0`. There's no path_to_mounted_volume. – catanasian Nov 25 '19 at 17:32
  • First mount the volume using nautilus. The output should be somehow: drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 júl 7 18:06 disk2 – kukulo Nov 25 '19 at 17:35
  • The d in drwxr-xr-x stands for directory. Of course your name will be different. – kukulo Nov 25 '19 at 17:36
  • Change yourusername to your user name. – kukulo Nov 25 '19 at 17:37
  • Trying to mount using Nautilus gives me the same error: ```Unable to access location Not authorized to perform operation``` – catanasian Nov 25 '19 at 17:51
  • Use command sudo mkdir /media/disk2 and sudo mount /dev/sdbX /media/disk2 where replace sdbX with the disk from command lsblk. – kukulo Nov 25 '19 at 18:10
  • Then sudo chown yourusername: yourusername /media/disk2/ – kukulo Nov 25 '19 at 18:10
  • The first mount command worked, and after doing so the drive is accessible via nautilus (until it's unplugged). The `sudo chown username:username /media/disk2/` gives me `chown: changing ownership of '/media/usb_drive/': Operation not permitted` – catanasian Nov 25 '19 at 18:18
  • Can you create a directory on the drive with sudo mkdir /media/disk2/my_dir ? – kukulo Nov 25 '19 at 18:27
  • Does the root have access to usb drive? – kukulo Nov 25 '19 at 18:28
  • Yeah, creating a directory worked but only as root. I also can create directories as root in nautilus but not without root. – catanasian Nov 25 '19 at 18:28
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/101477/discussion-between-catanasian-and-kukulo). – catanasian Nov 25 '19 at 18:29
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I have tried it but still can't work. The workaround is keep username in chrome-remote-desktop. Remove chrome-remote-desktop service from systemctl.

sudo systemctl disable chrome-remote-desktop

Then add command /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop/chrome-remote-desktop --start to "Startup Applications Preferences" via the GUI.

Tejas Lotlikar
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skylence
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  • `# systemctl disable chrome-remote-desktopchrome-remote-desktop.service is not a native service, redirecting to systemd-sysv-install. Executing: /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install disable chrome-remote-desktop` – James Bowery Mar 01 '20 at 19:27
  • Didn't work after `systemctl disable` and run on startup. Still get "Not authorized...." even after reboot. – James Bowery Mar 01 '20 at 19:45
  • Worked after `# gpasswd -d myusername chrome-remote-desktop` so I'm not sure why you said "keep username in `chrome-remote-desktop`" when a prior answer said to delete it from `chrome-remote-desktop` and gave the other commands you gave. ie: The prior answer gave the correct solution at least for me but apparently did more than you needed. – James Bowery Mar 01 '20 at 19:55
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Today I had the same issue with my external 500gb hdd, I did next, it helped me:

sudo apt remove chrome-remote-desktop
Volodymyr Oliinyk
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