Lost access to my video folders - again!

[Plexmandahl]

Server Version#: 1.32.8.7639
Player Version#: 4.116.1
I have a problem making Plex see my media directories on my PC. This is what happened.

I use Plex on MX Linux. In my previous installation MX Linux and Plex were installed on an external SSD drive that was connected to my laptop. The media files were on another external drive. I had a lot of difficulty getting Plex to see the media files, but in the end I managed to do it. I don’t exactly know what the problem was or even precisely how it was fixed, but it probably had something to do with permissions. The story is here Problem installing server on laptop after Linux re-installation from backup

What I recently did was to install MX Linux on a new laptop. I used a Live-USB made from my previous installation (the one on the SSD) and I installed it on the new laptop. The media files remained on the external drive that I now connected to the new laptop.

The new Linux installation works fine with the external drive. I can see the media files there and I can also download, copy, delete etc.

Plex on the new laptop however does not see the sub-directory on the external drive where I keep my media files. Moreover it doesn’t see any files inside the external drive. For testing purposes I added a media file inside the root directory of the external drive, I added the root directory as a location, but Plex didn’t see the file.

Plex on my old laptop with the external SSD installation sees the external drive media. So, I don’t understand what has gone wrong. Please note that the Plex installation on the new laptop shows all my media viewing history up to the time before I installed Plex on the laptop.

[OttoKerner]

@Plexmandahl

The new Linux installation works fine with the external drive. I can see the media files there and I can also download, copy, delete etc.

Most likely because the auto-mounter of your Linux is handling this. However, these auto-mounters only mount the drive with access permissions suited to you the user. Not to Plex, which runs as its own user account.
Therefore you should not rely on these auto-mounters and mount the drives as described in

Linux Tips

Using other hard drives (Windows or Linux) with PMS This How-To is written to help with Internal and External drives. It also is written to demonstrate how to cope with NTFS and EXT4 formatted drives. By logical extension, any format supported by Linux can be handled using the technique shown here. In all cases, the goal is to give user plex permission to read your media files which Linux doesn’t allow by default due to its strict security model. We will walk through the steps needed …

[Plexmandahl]

Thanks. I reached part C, and I entered
chown -R fred:fred /disks (using my own username). Followed by ls -la /disks shows

# ls -la /disks
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 fred fred 4096 Jan 19 12:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 4096 Jan 19 12:50 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 fred fred 4096 Jan 19 12:50 andy
#

That is different than what is shown in part C. I therefore stopped here.

[Plexmandahl]

I think I solved it! I looked back at my previous problem and I decided to follow a similar plan. I changed the permissions on /media/fred/ to 755 and thankfully Plex now sees my sub-directory where the media files are kept.