I’ve been searching around trying to solve a problem where Plex wouldn’t read from my external hard drive on Ubuntu 12.04.
I couldn’t find a clear answer to my problem, but I managed to figure out what was wrong, and imagine that other people will have had similar problems.
If you want to stream from an external hard drive you must:
-Make sure the external hard drive is formatted to ext4 or ext3, NOT NTFS or FAT32 - this is because NTFS and FAT formats don’t allow you to change the read/write permissions of directories.
-Change the permissions of the external hard drive using the following command (assuming you are mounted to /media/):
sudo chmod 777 /media/yourexternalharddrive -R
-Add the directory through the Plex Media Manager web interface - e.g. /media/yourexternalharddrive
Following these steps you should be able to stream to Plex from your external hard drive.
It took me a while to figure out that I had to format the device to ext4 (I had it formatted to FAT32 so my ps3 could read directly from it).
I hope this small guide helps people - I’m not particularly linux-savvy and couldn’t find a direct answer to this problem anywhere.
If you have an extremely large external like my 2TB an easier method is to make a folder on your internal hard disk, then mount the NTFS drive to that folder. Saves the trouble of trying to reformat an extremely large drive, and allows the drive to still be used with windows (windows does not recognize ext4 formatted drives)
1. First find the drive
df -h
2. The drive should be listed as something like /dev/sdb1
3. Create your directory that you'll be mounting to, in this example I'm creating it on the desktop and naming it plexstuff
cd /home/user/Desktop<br />
sudo mkdir plexstuff<br />
4. Now we just mount your external hard drive to that folder
mount /dev/sdb1 /home/user/Desktop/plexstuff
5. Launch your plex media manager via the web interface and when you add a library make sure to point it at plexstuff instead of your normal /media/yourexternal path.
Some linux distros automount drives when they're plugged in. If this is the case you'll have to unmount the drive (but not unplug it!) before doing this.
To safely unmount the drive you can use
umount -a
to unmount everything that’s mounted or
umount /dev/sdb1
to unmount that particular device.
FYI when your terminal says you are not the root. You will need to type "sudo" in front of the above commands.
example: mount /dev/sdb1 /home/user/Desktop/plexstuff
replace with: sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /home/user/Desktop/plexstuff
same for umount. It wants you to be the root user.
Okay. I tried the first step mentioned because my external hd is ext4. It didn't work because I can see the drive but not the folders. I'd tried the second one first (the mounting it) but it changed every time I rebooted my computer. (Where the drive was sdb1, sdc1, sdf1, etc.) I'm not a Linux newbie but I am very unsure when it comes to stuff like editing my fstab and these specific permissions and stuff. Can someone help me?
For the first one I did:
sudo chmod 777 /media/myusername/Drivename (where it says it is mounted when I check disks)
I could find up to the drive name in Plex (when trying to add content to my folders) but not the actual content. I think I either need to edit my fstab so it will constantly mount in the same place or I need help changing the permissions so the first one would work.
I'm not trying to get anyone to do my homework for me but Google searches are coming up kinda lacking. If anyone can fill in the blanks I would greatly appreciate it.
Edited to add: Further Google searches led me to doing a chmod -R 777 on my /media/user folder. I am currently transferring the files to a different drive so I may reformat in the morning. Obviously I don't want to leave my system dangerously vulnerable. I can reformat the external after the files finish transferring. Would NTFS be a better format than ext4?
Okay. I tried the first step mentioned because my external hd is ext4. It didn't work because I can see the drive but not the folders. I'd tried the second one first (the mounting it) but it changed every time I rebooted my computer. (Where the drive was sdb1, sdc1, sdf1, etc.) I'm not a Linux newbie but I am very unsure when it comes to stuff like editing my fstab and these specific permissions and stuff. Can someone help me?
For the first one I did:
sudo chmod 777 /media/myusername/Drivename (where it says it is mounted when I check disks)
I could find up to the drive name in Plex (when trying to add content to my folders) but not the actual content. I think I either need to edit my fstab so it will constantly mount in the same place or I need help changing the permissions so the first one would work.
I'm not trying to get anyone to do my homework for me but Google searches are coming up kinda lacking. If anyone can fill in the blanks I would greatly appreciate it.
Edited to add: Further Google searches led me to doing a chmod -R 777 on my /media/user folder. I am currently transferring the files to a different drive so I may reformat in the morning. Obviously I don't want to leave my system dangerously vulnerable. I can reformat the external after the files finish transferring. Would NTFS be a better format than ext4?
I might be able to help.. What you want to do for the drive mount is to use the UID of the drive instead of the device reference (sdb1, sdbc2 etc). The UID is specific to the drive and will not change unless repartitioned etc.. Its really easy.. All you have to do is get the UID and use it in the mount command.
It will look something like this in the fstab -
#extra 2tb storage drive
Here is a tutorial - http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-finding-using-uuids-to-update-fstab/
First of all there is no such thing as a reformat, only a format. You may repeatedly format a drive but there is no such thing as a reformat.
Second, if you chmod 777 everything you are literally making everything on the drive executable…not a good idea.
Closing this thread due to thread age. It accidentally reopened during the transfer.
